A Christian

I thank God every day for his blessings. I have been a Christian since I was in the third or fourth grade. There have been times when I turned away from God and Christ's salvation, but recently I began going to a wonderful church again and reading the Bible weekly.

For anyone struggling, God loves you, no matter what you have done. I struggle to forgive myself for the things I saw and did in Iraq, but God forgives us all.

A not so quiet night

There really is nothing like having a car full of excited Cubans while you drive late at night down the switchbacks of the German / Austrian Alps in the frost and snow. The sheer joy and nervousness was palpable.

As we crested the mountain road and came to a beautiful meadow with an ice-covered turn-off I made a snap decision. Slowing down, I turned onto the dark road. With no electric lights anywhere around, my headlights pierced the darkness as they swept across the frost kissed grass all the way to the base of the foothills. As the car slowed down, my loud and loving Cubans became very confused and even a bit concerned. I stopped and turned off the engine, got out of the car, and then urged them to follow me. This request was met by a chorus of groans and anxious questions about what could be wrong.

At my insistent requests, they finally acquiesced, still confused they looked at me and at each other in the near darkness of the frozen night. I simply pointed up towards the sky, looking up, the only sound my cold Cubans and I could hear was our own breathing and our feet crunching on the frozen blades of grass.

It finally hit them.

The awe and amazement on their faces was easy to see in the starlight as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were so many stars! More than I had ever seen with exception to similar dark and cold nights on my grandfather’s farm in Wyoming. The entire Milky Way glowed across the sky, Orion’s Belt, the Seven Sisters, Mars, Venus, and so many other constellations and planets were visible. It was no longer quiet in the cold night, now the expressions of joy and happiness filled the quiet air. Their shivering and cold was momentarily forgotten as their eyes grew wide and their smiles were lit up on their faces by the twinkling distant stars.
This is one of those moments I will treasure and never forget. The night I spent gazing at the stars on a lonely road through Germany in the heart of the Alps with my wife and her parents. It was an extraordinary moment that I was able to share with those I love.

Summer Reading

I recently found out that my blog has been assigned reading for junior in high school English homework.

I was asked the question by a student the following in an email:

"What do you feel is the driving emotion behind the blog entries and why?" I felt that you felt guilty for killing so many people and devastating their families, while also feeling guilty for leaving yours at home. But truly I would like to know what was your driving emotion behind these blogs"


I thought I would share my response since I haven't written here for some time. I took a bit and reflected on why I did write so much...

Hello XXXXXX,

I am glad that you found my writing interesting. It is an odd feeling to have your experiences and writing read as summer homework but I am honored all the same. As to your question regarding my driving emotions behind my blog entries...

You mentioned guilt for the death I have caused. I suppose that there is guilt there, but if I had to go back I probably would have made many of the same choices. It is war and in war you fight or you die. you return fire or you are killed. That is the black and white of it, I am simplifying things a bit, there are so many gray areas because of the cities, the civilians and such but you still must understand that aspect.

When you do have to go to war, however. When you do have to kill or witness death and sorrow. When you can't look away because it is a child who was killed and you are the only one who speaks Arabic and must go comfort the family who just lost their little boy. Those memories seep into your soul. I began to dream about those things all the time. You see I have what is called PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). It is what happens when you have seen or experienced something so traumatic that you mind has a very difficult time dealing with it. There are many symptoms (nightmares, insomnia, hyper-alertness...) I chose to write about those events. For me it
was my attempts to put my daemons to rest. I still can't sleep very well and I think back to those days often, especially the day I had to see the boy killed.

I don't really know what else to tell you. Take care XXXXXX

Zach

My life as a Metaphor

My life is a metaphor for something, I just don't know what that metaphor is... Swirling and floating along all the while connected through the type of work I do. Drifting from one experience to the next. I'd be lying if I told you that I was hitting every high along the way, lows are as frequent during my journey as those beautiful cliff top peaks. You have to learn to find beauty in that darkness as well, the darkness of those valleys.

Even the lowest marshlands serve their purpose. Looking out the window I see multiple worlds staring back. My eyes are one pane of that realm, a window (mostly one sided) from my head to the physical world. I sit in front of an actual window right now, looking at a homeless man sitting on a bench down there by the road. His world and mine are miles apart however right now unbeknown to him we are sharing something even if it is only one way in a voyeuristic sense to me and he is unknowing in his role.

Next comes the life around me, the people colliding in their words, their bodies, and their thoughts. Some collisions bring union as one person finds a connection with one another. Others bring conflict as personalities clash over things that are mostly nonexistent. Mere thoughts in one's head, inflections of the voice and the posture of the body.

I play a game in times like this. My head harbors secret thoughts about those around me, ideas and stories about who they are and what kind of life they live. That man alone at the end of the bar, he keeps checking his phone, texting with someone and drinking his beer oblivious to the game going on next to him. He appears as lonely as I feel right now.

The three friends at the bar next to him look like they are mixing the secrets to the universe with the friendly banter of the young. They stack their empty glasses into pyramids and look serious as they try to hold back their smiles, the smiles of the young and naive who (as I said before) believe they know some secret to the universe. I know this because I too once believed I knew that wise bit of knowledge which seems so allusive to most adults. It is merely the ideas of youth. Age and experience bring wisdom. I have seen 20 year old men in Iraq who have lived lives more tattered and worn than old men I had met.

My thoughts for today, take them with a grain of salt or take them to heart...

Stream Of Conscious

The sum of my existence is not Iraq. It was simply one of the most influential experiences I have had. I must do better about being a good father and husband and I hope and pray that I’ll do well speaking this weekend at Randolph-Macon College in VA.

Life can not remain always in the past however when one becomes a soldier, a warrior, then perhaps that is all they know. Taking life and seeing death changes you; no longer do you fit in with civilian society. Police officers who shoot someone are placed on leave while soldiers on the other hand are commended and encouraged to become better at it. That change is why I think we feel so out of place when we get home. On some level we remain in that place of war trapped by our memories and their stubborn refusal to accept that we are once again in a safe place. That we are once again home.

New and Old Thoughts

Slowly I assessed the situation; my gun was near and I know that it can feel so nice having that cold lethal steel pressed against your body, reminiscent of war in desolate sorrowful places where things seem to only become broken. In THAT place my body was perfect, my mind was not however, it was bitter and un-amused with the daily carnage of ‘peace keeping operations’. Money is nice but the purity of thought can become even more addicting especially when you know you could die in the next instant.

That rare rain becomes so beautiful to you because of its simplicity as it brings life to such a dead place. The sun both harsh and incredible shines unrelenting on you and your bristling weapons as you ride under it with the thoughts rattling around your head of your own death or that of another.

There are times when I feel broken from my experiences, times when I can’t conveniently sweep them into that black hole inside me where I send memories to be buried for a while. For some reason they always resurface and with them my retrospection brings both immaculate recreations of war as well as regret and a sick longing for a place where people like me can be. A place where you could die and where it would be so far away that even the land you live and walk on feels like it want’s your blood.

Some times I remember only colors. Then there are things like a night with another soldier who I have long forgotten, we sit and drink a beer we bought on the black market during a trip to Baghdad from our home in Falloujah. I talk about my family and children as he talks of his. This soldier whom I have forgotten, I make him a promise that we will get our families together, he is from another unit, but in war we were brothers. As we get home I hug my children and he searches the crowd of family members for his wife and kids. His kids he sees, they are with his mother. His wife has left him and his kids as well. We never have that promised barbeque and we are no longer brothers because his loss reminds him of that hot Iraqi night drinking Egyptian beer with me.

Those empty promises add up and in my head I find myself remembering them and tallying them up as defeats of my soul. Maybe I could have been a better friend, maybe I could have remembered his name, and maybe we could have kept our promise. Everything revolves around that phrase, ‘when we get back we will…’ perhaps we will be better dads, or we won’t ever argue with our wives, or perhaps we will simply cherish every moment.

I haven’t kept those promises I made in my heart. I have had fights with my wife, I have been short with my kids, and I haven’t cherished every moment with my family. In fact I have at times become just like everyone else. Iraq is a land far away and home is here and now. Home is stressful, home is bills, home is work, and home is uneventful as we forget all we learned on the foreign soils of war and her spiteful malice which was such a harsh teacher. I am sorry, not only do I try to bury those thoughts; I failed to completely learn from them…