Status Updates From Leaving the Wire: An Infant...

So far so good!

It was early morning, Christmas Day, 2005--- the merriest Christmas I'd ever had. My war was over.

He'd taken off his Kevlar and sunglasses. Eyes wide open, he stared into the space in front of the Humvee, his face a mask of shock, horror, and frustration. He slammed his Kevlar on the roof of the vehicle and, barely intelligibly, cussed a few times.

It wasn't like the dead Iraqi was an insurgent, but to me it was just another Iraqi corpse. I hadn't killed him, nor had I created the situation in which he was killed. I simply didn't care. His life mattered little to me.

Route clearance meant that we made sure the road was clear of bombs. If we drove through it without getting hit, it was clear. If we drove through it and got blasted, it was also clear since we detonated what was there.

People lived their lives regardless of the war. A friend of mine traveled the country with a band on tour, and Karen had completed her first half of summer classes.

The two soldiers who were in the back of the humvee were burned beyond recognition, but their bodies were mostly intact. Their black, charred remains filled two of the body bags. Everyone was picking up the pieces of the others--- with instructions to just fill the bags evenly if we couldn't tell what was what.

I'd experienced being primed for action before. This was different. This was being ready for violence. This was the hatred and anger that I imagined the Marines to have felt after losing their buddies. I understood it now.

It seemed that Saddam's old military structures were about the only thing well constructed in Iraq. A house in Haswah would have been leveled after all that shooting.

Everyone loved explosions, and it was gratifying to have found something of the enemy's and destroyed it.

The Marines had tagged the insides of the rooms with black spray paint. There were lots of 'Semper Fi,' of course, their squad and platoon numbers, and a memorable one, 'Iraq: Best Hunting on Earth,' rounded it out.

There was sightseeing of sorts. We passed the Ziggurat of Ur. I was able to get a decent view of it through the ISU. It looked like a pile of rocks in the middle of the desert.

My easy last year in the Army with a chance to go to sniper school got erased with one phrase actually: "Extended for the convenience of the government."