QBLOG #33 Birds of a Feather

It has been an interesting and trying week here in Iraq. I've had my own little pity party' this week. It tends to happen to me when I become exhausted and I loose the capacity to focus on what matters. We've been hit by mortars almost everyday last week, and several times each day. I probably say this too often, but I don't realize how much the incoming mortars can affect you...how they can affect me. It is as if all the energy in my body is drained. It does not happen during the attack. It tends to happen a few days after. With the constant attacks this week, it felt like a chasm was opening inside me and swallowing up every bit of energy I had. When this happens, my defenses are down and I tend to get emotional.

I was sitting in the DFAC watching the breaking news on CNN regarding the Israeli attacks on Southern Lebanon against Hezbollah and Hezbollah's return fire hitting the city of Haifa. I saw the bombing and the result and the fear on the faces of those that were interviewed. Anderson Cooper was commenting that Hezbollah stated they were not targeting civilians, but that the rockets they used were known for their inaccuracy. A soldier sitting beside me looked over with a huge smile on his face and stated, "heck that is what we get hit with all the time., isn't it?" It is not. Those are Rockets. We get mortared. It seems the same because both are inaccurate.

So many different things are going on around us. It seems difficult to figure out exactly what is happening. In an instant it is as if everything appears as it is. Yet in the next instant nothing appears to be as it is. It creates this sort of crash in your head as you attempt to pull everything apart piece by piece and then try to reorganize it in a way that will make sense. How is it that one makes sense out of the world as it is? Do you put the reality away and make something up that makes sense, or do you sit in the reality of it, bewildered?

Not long ago a bomb went off in Baghdad (ok, that is everyday here) that caused the government to implement a curfew. The curfew was sudden. We had many Iraqi's still here on base and when they discovered the curfew many of them panicked. They panicked for fear that their wives or children would be kidnapped, raped and/or killed. These men were distraught beyond belief crying almost beyond comfort- wanting, needing to get to their families. With the assistance of some soldiers, many of them made it back. How does one make sense of that fear or the basis for it? Another day comes and goes. Life goes on. The men come back to work, we forget about the bomb, about the curfew about the many innocents that are killed here and around the world everyday. It is too much for the mind to handle.

I have been taunted by several of my colleagues in Iraq about extending my tour. I have told them that I will not. They do not believe me. Many of them were here last year when I left. I swore then that it would be a cold day in Hades before I returned. I'm not sure when hell actually got cold, but it must have been around February this year. I could not imagine coming back at the end of my tour last year. When I returned home though, I truly felt like I had landed on another planet. Everything familiar to me was foreign to me. Every conversation was a test in my ability to not start screaming from the top of my voice, "DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE REST OF THE WORLD!!!" It was unfair and I restrained myself. But in that restraint I felt absolutely alone and lost. The only thing that seemed to make sense to me then was coming back to Iraq. In Iraq I could feel the raw emotion of the people. Of war. Of life. Of death. It sits there waiting for you to speak, to open up and take you. And it made absolutely no sense at all.

I've begun reading Anderson Cooper's, DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE. There is absolutely nothing that I would have thought I had in common with Anderson Cooper. In reading just the first two chapters I found myself in tears and laughing and nodding in agreement with his thoughts, his words. He put into words how I and so many of us that have been deployed feel and have felt. There is something he says about the more times you leave your home, the harder it is to return. It is not about the people and it is all about the people. There are experiences that each circumstance brings, but they are not similar and yet they are all the same. You cannot talk about what you experience in a war zone, or a crisis area because there is so much emotion that you feel it will burst out of you like a crazy person and you won't be able to stop. You won't be able to control it. So you keep things back. You live in your dreams and nightmares and somehow, you are drawn back. Back is the place you can relate to others without sounding crazy. Back is where, in some strange twist of comprehension, you feel the most comfortable. Back is where your mind keeps saying no, but your emotions are drawing you ever closer to returning.

They say that birds of a feather flock together. It is true. And it isn't. The more life I live the more I find that there is no black and white. There is no simple right and wrong. There are fewer boundaries and yet there are more. Birds instinctually know when to leave and when to return. There are clues provided to them and they are open to receiving those clues and taking note when they need to move on. In Mr. Cooper's book he starts off talking about a shark. In order for the shark to live, it needs to be moving all the time in order for air to flow thru its gills so it can breathe. It is the only way for it to survive. The shark, of course, is a euphemism. The shark represent's himself and in his belief, he must always be moving in order to survive. Those around him are the same. This is what they do. It has helped me to understand my friend Eddie who is also a foreign correspondent now living in Africa. It is helping me understand parts about me.

Fear has been something I have talked and written and begged people to overcome. It has been my own need to overcome fear that has mostly prompted this tirade. I am beginning to see that fear is not all bad. Fear can indeed motivate us to move outside of the place of comfort we have created for ourselves. It can also keep us there. There comes a point in time for each of us when the pressure or the fear of remaining status quo becomes too great, and we move forward in order to live. We become the shark. We must survive.

I've now ranted on longer than intended. I find that thru this Blog I am able to share and say things that I am not always able to in person. This is my voice shared. I may sound crazy, but I am not privy to the looks that would say, "he's crazy!". Somehow it makes it better. Love has caused me to move in this direction. But fear was not absent. In the world, it seems, both must exist. The ying and yang. Good and Bad. One, it seems, cannot be without the other.

Be well. Be blessed. and as Gloria Vanderbilt told her son Anderson, "find your bliss".

Robert