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MY TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY!!
Two years ago today I stepped off of that airplane in Salt Lake City. No cliches about "time flying by" seem fitting at the moment. Life is too colorful, too much of a grand adventure to taint its description with an overused play on words.
I remember everything as if it were yesterday, and yet I've learned and grown so much in the last two years that it's like watching someone else in my mind - some other soldier, some other father, some other soul.
I still maintain this blog, even though I am inactive with the Army right now. I am still "Captain K" for at least a while longer, until I make some more decisions about my career. Right now I'm enjoying my days more than ever before, writing full-time, and working hard to build my company Desert Sun Writing and Editing.
Many of you know that my hometown is New Orleans, but I've been living in Salt Lake City, Utah (on and off) for the last 12 years. Well, after 1/3 of my life there, I have now moved my little family to an absolutely gorgeous town in southern Utah where I'll be closer to family. It's actually a desert climate not so different from the deserts of Iraq. Do I smell irony?
I still receive almost 30,000 hits a month here at Wordsmith at War, which is both humbling and exciting at the same time. Thank you all for your continued support.
BOOK UPDATE: I have wasted some valuable time dealing with an agent who simply wasn't the right one for me. Then I've become preoccupied with life and work (and moving!), so I put the book project on the proverbial back burner. Recently I've been thinking about it again, and even considered a print-on-demand service so that I can get the book out to my readers (and hopefully get some new ones) once and for all. Just as I started researching print-on-demand, I received a letter from a university press I queried a while back. So.. I'm playing the waiting game again with my non-fiction book about Iraq. Here's what I know for sure: I've decided to publish 44 of my most popular essays from the last three years in a collection. The book is complete and ready to go. I'm simply need to decide how exactly I'm going to publish. As always, I really appreciate you visiting my blog, and ask you to keep an eye out for my forthcoming collection. If you have any thoughts or questions about the book, please don't hesitate to leave a comment or e-mail me.
Finally, in the name of my anniversary and the inspirational, exciting changes in my life, I'm going to re-post something I wrote two years ago, when I was flying back and forth across the Atlantic on emergency leave because my mom was very sick and Hurricane Katrina had recently struck. I saw soldiers walking around my hometown with loaded weapons, but I had to go back to Iraq. Each time I flew back, I felt frustrated and wondered if I should be serving in New Orleans or the Sunni Triangle. I questioned my own path and sometimes grew cynical and philosophical about the way Americans were supporting their troops. We are still a country at war, and I still have soldiers in Iraq who I sent there personally as their company commander. And yet very few people that I meet in my little microcosm of America seem too concerned. This is a bit of generalization, but I don't know... is it just me?
A Letter to the Republic for Which We Stand
America, we remain your constant and faithful servants. Satellites that hover 23,000 miles above the planet in geospatial orbit feed down into our little dish and we get to see sports, current events, and news. We know what you’re up to. We might watch the news for 10 minutes after a long shift outside the wire, just enough to get the highlights, read it on the internet, have friends mail us copies of newspapers, or monitor CNN just as the insurgents do, for breaking news. Maybe you know one of us personally, or maybe we’re nothing more to you than nameless faceless soldiers on TV. Either way, we still know about the hurricanes down South, the newest movies and music, the earthquakes in Pakistan, and the latest football scores.You populate our dreams.
Your state of affairs is part of our thought processes, however hard it may be right now to recall exactly what it felt like to stand within those borders. The mind and eyes play tricks on you when you live in this environment, always on guard, ready to kill if needed.
Yes, we’re soldiers, but who wants to live this way? What man enjoys being threatened all the time? Show me that man and I’ll show you a fool. But ask me to show you a person who is willing to live like this so that Americans back home can live more safely, and we’ll show you a couple hundred thousand.
Drive your comfy cars to work, we want you to. It makes you the personification of our daydreams. As you’re giggling at the immature humor of local morning radio comedy, sipping a vanilla latte from Starbucks, oblivious of the gunshots and explosions in Iraq, and tailgating the car in front of you, we’re trying to stay alive out here. We are not complaining - we raised our hands and swore to serve. But we do envy the ease with which you can walk out of your door and take a casual stroll through streets that are not your own in that soft suburban streetlight safety.
We wouldn’t expect you to alter your lives for us – you’re not soldiers. Don’t travel 7,000 miles to fight a violent and intelligent enemy -we’ll take care of all that. You just continue to prosper in the middle class, trade up on your economy sized car, install that new subwoofer in the trunk, and yes, the red blouse looks wonderful on you – buy it.
Remain the same embodiment of our fading memories, the portal to our daydreams, the catalyst for hope when hope eludes us, a land of winding roads and fishing holes, pretty pictures in frames, campfire stories, fields of wheat, skyscrapers made of glass, a woodshop, a fireplace, a patriotic song. Be you a mantle full of family photos, a smiling face at a convenience store, a dog that follows us around the yard, someone we meet spontaneously and get along and laugh with, the feel of grass on our bare feet as we walk out to get the morning paper, a parade or a fair or a swap meet.
Be you a pool table in a dimly lit room, a candle in a window, a Christmas tree, a rainy day, a hug after a hard day, a bowl of chicken noodle soup when we have a cold, the feel of a steering wheel in our hands, gravity tugging at our calves as we walk up a mountain trail, the thrill of water running over rock, a stone thrown from a bridge, or skipping across a lake, someone to call on a cell phone just because, or our favorite band coming to play a show in our hometown at an outdoor amphitheater. Be you the faces of strangers at that concert, laughing, smiling, silhouetted in light and smoke amidst the energy of musical celebration, or be Chris Cornell’s CD, Euphoria Morning, which has some lyrical moments that put chills down my spine.
Be all of these things and more, as we know you can.
Just be what you will, Americans, with your goods and bads, your lights and darks, your jerks passing at 100 mph in the slow lane ( Believe it or not, I miss you jerks – I will relish the next opportunity I have to give you the finger), your wrong change and bad attitude because you don’t like your job at the drive thru, your high school boy with braces handing us that delicious movie theater popcorn (extra butter please), your mall food courts, your egg-drop soup, your soft shell taco for .49 cents on Tuesdays, your dryer sheets that make the pillow case smell so damn fine, your beautiful face the first thing we see in the morning, your crying children, and yes, your diapers that need changing.
Remain a perfect parody of yourself by having a mid-life crisis and listening to tribal meditative music on a state of the art CD player that you ordered from Sharper Image.com. Buy that Porsche and drive it to Yoga class, or be the guy in Wyoming whom I cursed because he won the Power ball and he was already a millionaire.
Be whatever you choose. Let fate and destiny and blind luck and synchronicity guide you.
But please remain constant as well, because we have changed.
Don’t move the continent. Don’t sell the house. Don’t lose the dog.
