Update 7

I helped roll over a 7 year old patient today. I realized while doing it that I haven't touched another person in a month. I might be losing touch, very literally, with other people.

And with that disturbing revelation, it is time for another Update.

We are nearing the 1/3 mark on this deployment and it has reached the point where everyone seems bit resentful. It happens in all deployments, usually around this point. There is still more to go than you can comfortably imagine and you are no longer in the first blush. I remember a manager at a coffee shop telling me that the 3^rd year of a relationship changed everything. That the way you weather year 3 is the barometer for how relationships work. I took it very much to heart, though I have no idea why. I think it was that she reminded me of my friend Julie Navatsyk, who always seems wise. Anyway, the point is, this is the deployment equivalent of that manager's 3 year hypothesis.

We have Freeze Warnings every night and the rains haven't happened yet. I have heard that the good thing about the cold and the wet is that in the mornings there are beautiful frost patterns all over the ground. Think the ice fairies in Fantasia. They say that that will happen, but I haven't seen it yet.

Everyone is becoming bored, searching for things to do to fill their time. Little coffee groups have sprung up. "Let's go to the lounge and play cards and drink coffee." It's like the whole military is turning into an amateur production of Friends. It makes me wish I was awake during the day. I always fancied myself as Chandler-esque.

The hospital is full of Afghan patients and fewer and fewer US. That's a good thing, in a way. It means that things are going better than it seems like. But the Afghans that we have are younger and younger. It makes me think about the Russians and the way they used to intentionally target the children. It seems like Al Quaeda has learned all the wrong lessons from their years and years of war. I read an article in a British paper the other day in which the British Forces lead in Afghanistan said they are successfully proving to the populace that we are peace-loving and care about the Afghan peoples; that the Taliban does not and that they are the bad guys. I like that idea. I hope he is right.

I have been thinking a lot about this idea of Good Guys and Bad Guys. I think that, while it is not something original to America, it is an inherently American idea. The Beach Boys song Get Around has the lyric: "The bad guys know us and they leave us alone." I was thinking that that's something that Americans believe. We believe that we are the good guys. No matter what the situation. (In the case of the song, it seems like the Beach Boys are singing about being a gang of youths who drive over the speed limit. I doubt that people at the time, who encountered such youths, thought of them as the good guys.) But the attitude persists, and I like it. We do think about whether we're doing the right or wrong thing, which is something that I am not sure that everyone always does. As a nation, I mean, we do.

Take the Iraq War. The big issue there is, were we justified in going in and making war? We were, we think, during Gulf War I. I think that that's true. We were definitely justified there. When we went back, we first spent months and months deliberating over whether or not there was justification to go back. And publically, we argued this in the halls of government publically. That's a powerful thing to be able to say. There may well have been, and probably was, a lot of back-room dealing that happened, but we argued the matter in public. That means that we were open about our reasons and our reasoning. That's something that makes me feel like a good guy.

We are here now, voluntarily with the British, running a hospital that has more Afghani patients then US or UK. That's another thing that makes me feel like we're good guys. And, and I know that this is a difficult point to make, when we harm innocents it is not intentional. That's huge, to me. There are going to be innocents harmed. And sometimes is will be done by madmen who want only to ruin lives. And SOMETIMES those madmen will be American. We are a big nation and we have our share of nutballs. (See the latest Vanity Fair article about Randy Quaid if you want further proof. It's a compelling read and also batshit insane.) But they are not the majority, they are not the thrust of our military and they are not thinking and publically arguing about whether or not what they are doing is justified. All the Platoon-style, over-acted melodrama of a dramatized Mai Lai massacre is absent from the crazy cases of ACTUAL abuse of power. To put it another way, there was no murdered-Christ-like-Dafoe manqué in Abu Ghraib.

That's something that makes me think that we ARE The Good Guys, and I like being on that team. It's something that keeps me warm on the cold nights and something that keeps the resentments and slights of day-to-day communal living tamped down. The guys might be stepping on my toes, but at least we're all Good Guys together.