Update 15

As a sort of comparison piece, I thought I'd show you some of what I
wrote when I was in Cambodia. Many of you will have seen it before,
but to some it will be new.
You can see more of it here:
http://thewayitwere.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

This was the second Update I wrote from Cambodia and it was at the
half-way point of that deployment. I think you'll see that a lot of
the feelings are similar, even though that was not a war-zone
deployment and it was only about 2 weeks. Deployments have a familiar
rhythm, where ever they might be.

Have you ever had a really bad hangover? Have you ever had a really
bad hangover and then had to sit in oppressive heat and take blood
pressures of smelly people all day? How about this one, have you ever
had a really bad hangover, had to spend the day taking smelly blood
pressures and then had the tent you are under collapse over you?
Welcome to my Friday!

Thursday night was a celebration of sorts. Dr. J, our veddy British
doctor, was leaving us on Friday morning and we were sending him off
in Cambodian high-style. By which I mean, there were almost clean
plates to eat off of and people who had had the foresight to bring
their own booze from home broke it out. The misty, finger stained
glasses at the restaurant were the perfect counterpoint to our fine
Scotch whiskey, and in true Navy style we shot the two fingers of 22
year aged Glen Fiddich. Then the good Dr. broke out his private stash
of Bacardi and we got down to a serious goodbye. It was in the midst
of telling a story that I realized that my tongue was no longer under
my control, and it was then that my friend Thompson and I decided to
stumble back to out tents.

Have you ever slept on a spinning cot before? It is most unpleasant.
The normal discomforts of camping are nothing until they are combined
by a really good, beer, scotch, rum-drunk. I may have thrown up some
rice, organ meats, random unidentified vegetables, the four massive
Angkor beers I'd had before the scotch and then all the liquor I've
ever seen. I may have thrown them up into a water bottle. It may have
been an unfortunate water bottle to discover when I woke up in the
morning. And when I say it may have been these things, I guess I mean
it was so. Not that I am trying to duck responsibility for my actions
or anything, I genuinely made the incredibly foolish choices that led
to this miserable end, but there were extenuating circumstances… I
really hadn't liked being sober the day before.

That morning started at about 0230. After having voided my entire body
cavity at about 1030 I fell into a fitful and feverish doze. At 0230
one of the other fellows in my tent lost his iPod earbuds and blasted
the rest of the tent with the supremely restful sounds of Minor
Threat, or perhaps it was Social Distortion. At any rate, the group
that played had a name that brings to mind the overthrow of
governments by violent means. They are a loud, obnoxious,
spirit-rending musical group and they were played at decibel levels
that explain this fellow's general inability to hear orders when
shouted at him. Finally we resolved the earbud issue and fell back
into the snooze that had been formerly denied.

Within 40 minutes the local roosters started crowing, their internal
alarm apparently set several time zones to the left of their actual
location. When they ceased crowing the rise of the sun in Alabama
there was a scant 20 minutes of rest before some spirited Cambodian
mistook our tents for the home away from home of American Idol. He
burst into frenzied song for 40 or more minutes, during which time I
lay in a stupor of illness and fever. While I prayed that the singing
would cease so that I could once more pretend that sleep was possible
I envisioned a massacre. I saw myself wielding a bloodied machete,
with the blood of a thousand roosters and all amateur vocalists, the
world over, staining its blade. If I had had a machete, and had not
been so given over to ensuring my continued breathing by intense
concentration, what a legend I could have been.

When the local Cambodian William Hung finally ceased his endless
rendition of "She Bangs Cambodia" I allowed my breathing to take over
and slept the 10 minutes that the local populace allowed before their
early morning horn and Caribbean steel drum chorus took over the
musical duties. Might as well try to sleep at CBGBs. I wrestled myself
from my mosquito netting and stumbled around in the remains of my
dinner while using baby-wipes to clean the more egregious filth from
the floor and my body. After a miserable shave and morning toilet I
ate some MRE bread and jam for breakfast, drank some luke-warm bottled
water and started taking morning vital signs.

The Cambodian people are not regular bathers. I have had experience
with people who rarely bathe. The detainees in Guantanamo Bay are not,
as a rule, the most hygienic of men. This did not particularly bother.
They have a spicy smell, those detainees, they are a human curry. A
rich mélange of spices and bodily oils. Afghanistani people are the
spice of life, however evil and insane they may be. Cambodians, on the
other hand, are like an armpit. Perhaps like an armpit that has not
learned to adequately wipe its bottom, if your mind can conceive of
such tortured anatomy. There is something in their odor that makes one
wish for almost any other scent. Pure toilet filth has it over
Cambodian peasant in the pure toilet filth is a distinct smell, not a
mixture of foulnesses. Perhaps I overstate this, but there is truth in
it.

Take this unpleasantness on top of already being filthily sick and
repulsed by one's own smells and the day becomes an unpleasant
admixture of nausea. It's also impressive how, in a country absolutely
rife with skin diseases, parasites, amputated limbs, gross deformities
and dengue fever there is daily someone who combines all of these
features into so startling a visage that comment is forced from you.
In so much as there are general unfortunates and general combinations,
and the wearying morass of humanity parades before you without pulling
one up short for comment, the ones that really stand out stand out in
such a grotesque way. Your hand, reaching for their wrist to check the
pulse, draws back in horror and then, nerve overcoming distaste,
returning to the sore-encrusted member and squeezing for the
heart-thumping pulse. All the while your mind screams for release and
your hand shivers at the oozing pustules that are in its grasp. The
milky, desiccated eyes that stare, unlevel, out of the too cheerful
face, the toothless, rotten gum-landscape of their mouth.
Unforgettable, and yet always topped within the day by some horror
more grotesque. Dr Treves would have been beside himself here, so many
discoveries for the Academy. The poor elephant man would have been
only one in a crowd.

Miserable hang-over days are the longest ones, and it proved so on
Friday. Though I was sitting next to my dear friend Thompson I still
failed to appreciate the day as I have hitherto. Misery, heat, sweat,
despair, the four horsemen of a Cambodian hang-over.

In the early afternoon a wind kicked up. When I say a wind kicked up I
want you to imagine a scene from Pecos Bill, the tornado that Bill
roped and rode was not less forceful than the wind that kicked the
patient waiting-area tent off the ground and dropped it back onto the
poor Cambodians awaiting treatment. In the second of time I had to
react I started towards the people who were being endangered, which I
will always feel was a heroic impulse, but our LT called us all to
leave the tent area. In the moment of hesitation I was lost and by the
time I had turned back to help, all help had already been rendered. I
was only able to assist in the tent remediation, and even that I was
not much use. My friend Thompson managed to give a local woman heart
failure when he scooped her up from her peaceful seat and carried her
bodily out of the imagined harm's way. She was never in any danger
other than death by Thompson, but he wasn't to know.

After the eventual re-setting up of the tent there were many quiet
hours of vital signs, punctuated by kids with large upper arms,
friendly babies, pretty girls, and the occasional semi-human golem. We
saw 987 patients on Friday and it was a long, long day. When the
patients were finally gone we all had a medication sorting party until
around 8, at which point I took my fence-line shower, read some Paul
Johnson and collapsed into bed. The day over, I could finally reflect.
Never again, I decided, never again. I don't care how many British
doctors are leaving my life forever, I'm not mixing 151 and Glen
Fiddich for anyone. And let that be a lesson to all of you. Much love
as always and more to come.

For more of the Afghan Updates, please visit:
http://dustintheeverything.blogspot.com/?zx=ee6fac97810abcfc

Not really an Update

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghanistan-marines-20110123,0,1057854,full.story

Due to DOD policy, I can't see this story. But I hear that it is about
the Marines that are out here, Unit 3/5. We treated some of these
guys, I guess some of the ones that are in the story.

Just thought it might be interesting.

Update XIV

Well, the downward slope has started, were past half-way and everyone
can feel it. Fewer than 100 days remain in Afghanistan; it's time for
an Update.

Everyone is feeling that our time is closing, though there are still
so many more days of monotony that everyone is also getting angry with
the place. Every day that passes brings us closer to home, but the
race is still long. I used to have a CO that said, "You don't stop
running with the finish line in sight, no matter how long the race has
been." He'd say, "No one drops their pack within yards of the hump
being over." He was really into us finishing what we started. I have
never been one for the back end of things. I am good at starting and
rotten at finishing. That's why I have the first two chapters of so
many stories written.

The short tempers are only exacerbated by circumstances. Due to an
administrative SNAFU our 3 vehicles have been lost to a contractual
failing at some higher level. This leaves us with many problems, the
most pressing of which is that no one can get the mail. We have
several hundred pounds of mail sitting at the Post Office in the
adjoining camp, but no effective way of transporting it to the
Hospital. This is particularly troublesome for me, I have started my
next semester of classes and I am sure that my textbooks are over
there. Now technically I can go over and collect my own mail, and I
intend to. The problem is this: To do that I will have to leave work
at 0700, walk over to Leatherneck without a coat, when we were in
training they told us that we did not need cold-weather gear, so we
are all without. We have a warm, zip-up fleece, but they Marines on
the adjoining base have issued an order that says that this fleece is
not acceptable uniform, and therefore we are not to wear it. So,
without a coat, walk to the other base, wait until I can get the
packages from the post office, which will be at their leisure, then
carry the packages back to this base. The early morning, when this
will necessarily take place, routinely reaches temperatures of -7
degrees. It will be an uncomfortable thing to do. But, and I hope that
my professors appreciate the trouble, duty calls.

The other latest development has been an interest among my tent-mates
in minor divination. They have ordered Tarot Cards and hold nightly
readings. They have order Ouija boards and commune with spirits. I am
becoming used to waking to chanted incantations. I have expressed my
discomfort with this practice, but as the only one who is on a
separate schedule, I already feel bad for enforcing my whims on the
majority. I have taken to waking annoyed.

Since this is devolving into a bitch-session, I will try to change the
subject. The surge in troops has definitely been having an effect on
the number of visiting patients. This past week I've seen two
separate, very impressive, double amputees. They were both bilateral
BKA. (This is medical slang for the concept that both gentlemen were
missing both feet. Below the Knee Amputations.)

One of the fellows came in, his one foot just a bit of bone shooting
out of his pant leg and the other hanging on by shreds of skin,
sitting up and talking to the doctors. I was pretty impressed. I can't
think that I would handle it as calmly. He came in with a fellow who
had taken frags of the IED to his face and shoulder. This second
fellow was carrying on, crying and wailing. I was impressed by how
stoically the fellow with no feet handled himself. He wasn't joking
around or anything, but he was strong and composed. It was probably
shock, but I thought that it was also telling.

You never know, of course, how you will go out. You never know how you
will react. Everyone hopes that they will bear up with stoic dignity,
but we all suspect that we'll be the sort to cry and whine, our own
wounds seeming so immediate and terrible that we can't concentrate on
those around us or the comparative hardships they face. (Given how
much I complain in print, I will doubtless be the fellow who complains
at the slightest breeze.)

They tell you, in boot camp and at Field Medical School, that you can
never know how you will respond to combat. They say that people who
are wonderfully strong in all other areas freeze up when the Fog of
War descends upon them. It is one of the things that young men fear
about themselves. But then there is this next test, as I supposed
there always is. If you do not freeze up, how will you handle being
wounded? And then, I suppose, there is always that final test, how
will you handle death? That question hangs around the fringes of
everything, as our Heroes come into the morgue.

Ultimately, how can I blame a bunch of young men for looking for
answers in even the bogus arms of Ouija Board spiritualism? When you
see death on a regular basis, even if you're not in much danger
yourself, you start to think about it more than is healthy.

Samuel Johnson said, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not
having been a soldier." I think that every Soldier thinks meanly of
himself for not having been a combat veteran, and every Soldier knows
that, whatever combat they may have seen, someone else saw something
worse. It is an inevitable game of one-upsmanship. I had the
Congressional Medal of Honor described to me like this once: You can
only get it if your act one-ups the act of the previous recipient,
that's why it is almost always given posthumously.

In order to receive our highest honor, we have to die in service.
Maybe that's why a man can so calmly talk to his doctors without his
feet. He knows that he has only had a minor brush with military
greatness.

Lucky Update 13

Chapeau' means 'hat.' 'Oeuf' means 'egg.' It's like those French have
a different word for everything!" -- Steve Martin (1978)

Obviously I am not breaking ground when I tell you that different
cultures have different ways. I mean, what flies in New York isn't the
same as what flies in outer, peasant Afghanistan. That's not news to
anyone. (I hope it isn't. If I am blowing your mind right now, you're
likely to not make it through the rest of this Update.) So in the
light of the previous, less than revelatory statement, I have been
thinking about patriotism.

I have been thinking that a country's embrace of freedom has a lot to
do with a basic love of place. I mean that freedom is a part of a
national identity. I don't know if I am trying to say that I think
that freedom is part of a country's self-esteem, but I think that
there is something about the who of a place. (I am not sure this is
even something the English language can express, so if this is
muddled, bear with me.)

This is where I am coming from: We had a patient this week, a young,
local national girl. She had been assaulted, physically and sexually,
by her brother. Now, I am not super conservative, I believe in
generally living and letting live. I like my characters flawed. Show
me an hour long drama on television with a lead character that you're
not sure if you're totally on his side, whose charisma outshines your
basic human ability to judge his actions, and I am enthralled. I like
my shading gray. But I have to say, you attempt to beat up and rape
your sister and you're going to have to really bring it, on the
personality side, to still be considered merely flawed and not evil.
That's a bad guy move, 100%.

This girl came in and had to be guarded, had to be protected. She was
in more danger after the assault than before it. She was now eligible
for a death warrant, now she was considered damaged goods. And
contrary to all available evidence in their product-line economy, the
Afghan people do not allow damaged goods to live.

I think, though her final situation was not expressed to the
population at large, that she made it out of the local area and is
living a life that is as regular and safe as she can now. And that is
to the good. But it makes me wonder, how do you love a country where
this is the norm? And if you can't love your country, how can you
embrace its freedom? How can you pursue it whole-heartedly? Maybe you
can. I guess it isn't impossible. But I am not sure I could do it.

Now, I know that the US is not a bastion of righteousness all the way
to its center. I know that we have some dinge against our lily-white
character. George Washington held back from freeing the slaves due to
pragmatism. Our attitude towards the American Indian/Native American
population had some pretty dire consequences for their gene-pool.
We're not blameless in these areas. Paul Johnson, my favorite
historian, (How cool is it to have a favorite historian? Is it cool or
hopelessly lame? I am never sure.) wrote a whole book around the
question of whether America's virtues outweigh its sins. I think that
there is probably no way to judge it clearly, Justice is both blind
and pretty silent on most subjects, but I think that we are at least
trying.

For instance, when we as a nation find out that a fellow has assaulted
his sister, we generally don't take the fellow's side. We're usually
on the side of the victim rather than the victimizer. It's not a hard
and fast rule. We fail sometimes, but we strive. The Afghan people,
under their variation of Sharia Law, strive in another direction.

I have friends in the military who call the Afghans 'creatures.' They
do not consider them people. I think that might be a bridge too far.
But there are all of these things, all of these strikes against this
nation: This girl, the baby who drinks diesel fuel, the very strange
and very ingrained sexual practices of the men. All of these things
add up to an image of a place, a national character if you will. And
they make me wonder, how can you be patriotic about your country if
your national character makes Don Draper look like Galahad the Pure?

I know that when the US started, our freedoms were specific to white
men. And I know that that was wrong. I know that the situation in
Afghanistan is complicated. I know that the Soviet occupation was
terrible and that the excesses of an invading force led directly to
the excesses of Sharia Law as it is practiced today. (Incidentally,
how many death can we lay at the feet of the Soviet machine? There is
a very real way in which the Russian revolution led to the rise of
Nazi Germany, then there are the Gulags, then there is China and Cuba
and… eventually Afghanistan and the extreme justification of this view
of Islam. It makes me wonder what Karl Marx would think of it all. His
basic ideas went a long way in a direction I can't imagine he'd have
appreciated. It reminds me of Ricky Gervais bit about Hitler and
Neitzsche.) I am sympathetic to the idea that a host of evil led to
this world that the people of Afghanistan now inhabit. I appreciate
that there are complicated and long-term problems and that an economic
system of reforms could change a lot of the things that are accepted.
I am reluctant to view all of this as a spiritual problem, though that
is what my upbringing leads me to. But at some point I have to wonder,
how can we really free a people that live under this kind of bondage
to an ancient code? Even if we can give them the freedom to trade and
the infrastructure to build and the resources to exploit their natural
wealth, can we save the women, children and… the spirits, I suppose?
Is there hope?

I am not in the most beautiful part of Afghanistan. But I've seen
pictures and videos of areas that are gorgeous. Even the area where I
am has vistas. The sky here lacks the impressive, oppressiveness of
Montana's Big Sky Country, but there is no denying that the horizon
goes all the way to the ground. There are purple mountains majesty if
I look to the North. I can see loving things about this country, and
everyone loves the place they were born, to some degree. And again,
freedom and patriotism aren't a national self-esteem and I am not a
defeatist. I believe that this country should be free and that liberty
is an absolute good. I believe in the Rights of Man and in Natural
Law. But I think that Hobbes, not the tiger, is right when he says
that there will rise up brutal men who will control the weak-willed,
general populace.

I guess that I think that Afghanistan needs a few more Washingtons, a
few more men of will with the desire to do good, or at least to strive
for good. (And I think that I mean men. I am not trying to be sexist
here, but I think that the country is.) And I worry that without those
men this country will be cursed to fall back into the ways of the
past. But I have hope for their future. The US started out with some
pretty significant moral flaws and has striven through the years to
overcome them. I think that Afghanistan can do the same.

Update XII

I have been watching the first season of the CBS show The Unit. This
is a show about a secret, underground Special Forces Unit that answers
directly to the President, and their wives and families. It is an ok
show, not terrific or ground-breaking, but it's a smart premise,
created by David Mamet, and it speaks to something that I have been
thinking about more and more. If you are not in the military,
personally or by marriage, then you don't really get the military
life.

No that that it totally a bad thing. I am not sure that I'd want to
get it. I was watching the wives on The Unit and their interactions.
And of course they are over-heated and soapy, but they are also not
that far off. For all of the moments that stretch the idea too far,
The Colonel screaming at the wives that they will get their husbands
killed if they are not more paranoid, there are moments that are
really accurate. Moments where groups of women who have as a bond only
that their husbands do something dangerous, and then have to be
together and live together and sort out who they are as a group.

Maybe that's what it is, there is a specific group dynamic that comes
from not being blood-family, but being family that is brought together
due to circumstances beyond control. I have a friend, a really close
friend that I met in Okinawa, Japan. He and I write e-mails 3 or 4
times a week, for hours, if work permits. We go back and forth,
discussing everything from marriage to calling each other gay for the
slightest kind word. It's silly and male and great. We talk to each
other about things that we're trying to figure out how to say to our
wives. When my son died, I was writing to this guy about it. He and I
had been e-mailing for the whole time in the hospital. He's that kind
of friend. Like a brother, really. And that's from the military.
That's not from anything else.

Of the friends I grew up with, only one of them joined the military,
too. He and I had been close in the few years before I joined and now
that we are both in, our talks are as effortless as ever, but now they
have an added bond. We're not just the guys we were when we were in
our early twenties, we're also military guys. We have shared
experiences that other people don't have, and that they can't have. We
talk about deployments and things that happen on them. We tell each
other things that we don't tell our families, because our families
don't have the base-line understanding of what it is to be in the
military.

I have a younger brother. He's a Marine. Since he joined up, when we
talk we both know exactly what the other means. We're on the same page
because we're both experiencing the same things. I know what it is for
him, when he wants to deploy and wants to feel that side of the
military life. I know it because I feel it to. I know what he means
when he says that he isn't sure how to make his wife feel what he
feels. Because I know that you can't.

My wife, Margaret, says that she hears the most, to us, bizarre
questions. "Will your husband get to come home from Afghanistan for
Christmas?" To which she never really knows what to say. There isn't a
shuttle, you know? It's not even like taking the Concorde from London.
It's a lot more involved. And I am on a short tour, missing Christmas
is a bummer, but it is incidental. That's not the important thing. She
says that when people ask where I am and she says, "He is deployed to
Afghanistan." They look at her with faces of horror. She says it's
like she told them that I am on death-row and about to be executed. I
am gone for 6 months to a safe-ish area. To a military family, it's
not that big a deal.

We know what it is to live in a tent with people who don't let you
sleep, but who you would take a bullet for. We know what it is to sit
next to someone who drives you absolutely up the wall, but who you
would lay your life down for. Everyone knows this feeling, it's called
Family. But what you don't know is how that feeling can overlay people
who you have trained with. How you come to adopt, almost instantly,
people you would never otherwise spend 10 minutes with. But we not
only accept and embrace that stranger, we learn how to fight a war
with them and then we go out and do it.

And that brings me to the next point that I keep thinking about: When
I called home from Christmas my Grandma asked me, "Are we winning over
there?" And all I could say was, "Well, we're not losing." And the
reason that's all I could say is that we already won. I know that it's
a big joke now to say that. The whole Mission Accomplished banner and
all is a short, sharp, liberal laugh. But the fact of the matter is,
the Taliban no longer rules in Afghanistan. There are pockets of
resistance and we are here fighting a peace-keeping battle. But this
is Operation Enduring Freedom. We are assisting in the endurance of a
Liberty Under Duress. These are the birth-pangs, the travails of a new
country that will actually have the ability to choose its future.
That's an amazing thing to get to tell people.

So here we are, these men and women in the military life. We're all
forced together, a family we never expected nor chose, fighting to
change the world. And the world sees us as a strange and foreign cult
of anti-social misfits who are struggling in a war, 10 years on. But
that's not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as guardians of
liberty and freedom. We see ourselves as family, we see ourselves as…
well, I am not going to be able to say it better than Shakespeare, a
band of brothers. And for all the in-jokes and acronyms and the
general state of otherness that we project or seem to feel from the
American culture at large, we do this because we love that culture. We
do this because we love to see the American Flag flying on someone's
lawn, even if we know they don't take it down at sunset, like they are
supposed to. We love to see people gathered together and sharing time,
even if we only hear about it from our tent in Afghanistan. We do this
because, even though we aren't a part of America's normal life, we
love that life and are willing to die for it.

But not the members of CBS's The Unit, they have to be on again next week.

Update 11

A funny thing happened this morning. Just as I was about to fall asleep, at the moment when conscious thought had ceased but just before the tipping point into actual oblivion, a British fella burst into the tent and shouted, "IS ANYONE AWAKE?!" I made a sort of strangled, gargling, "Wha?" sound and he pulled the hanging blanket aside and said, "They've found a device by the construction, they think it's an explosive, everyone has to evacuate!"  I woke up the other three people in the tent and we went outside.

There were about twenty British wandering about and no one in charge. I asked where the bomb was and was told that it was by the new construction, I wandered to where I could see the area and saw British, non-bomb disposal sorts, just wandering all over the area. So I told everyone to just go back to bed. My reasoning being that if there was no crowd control, there was no bomb.  We all went back and after a period where I worried that I'd just made a choice that would kill us all, I fell asleep. 

Not quite two hours later, the fellows in my tent, their numbers now swelled to a daytime maximum, developed a game where one of them would pretend to sneeze and the others would shout out hearty, "BLESS YOU"s. They were also dropping a concrete basketball from the top of a tall ladder, or perhaps it was a boulder from the top of a specially built staircase. At any rate it was painfully loud against the hard plastic flooring and I eventually gave in and shouted, "I have accepted that, for my sins, I will not be allowed to sleep a straight 8 hours. That is inevitable and fair. I have accepted that your collective insistence on weight lifting means you live on an all-protein, all-flatulence diet and I will sleep inside the olfactory equivalent of a packet of freeze dried peanuts, a smelling, gaseous haze. But do you have to be so predictable? Is this all a response to the tuba lessons I take at night, while you all sleep? Is it the strings of firecrackers I light off in the wee hours of the morning? No, it isn't, because I don't do these things! If it were an option, I would encase my head in a sound-proof, asbestos box every morning and breathe through the gills that I developed on my chest, but in spite of all the testimony of my senses, the generations required for massive evolutionary changes to have taken place have not actually passed. I am still forced to listen while you all make as much noise as is humanly possible and I am starting to think that you are actually enlisting supernatural aid. Or is this cacophony some sort of rite you engage in, in order to ward off the more timid demonic entities? Because I have to tell you, at this point you would be better off purchasing tripwires and claymores, because lying here in the throes of enforced insomnia I am no longer able to think of anything besides ways of slowly and tortuously murdering each and every one of you. It is only a matter of time before lack of sleep drives me from mere murder into actual corpse mutilation. So, if you are hoping to, A: live long and fruitful lives and/or B: have remains that can be reassembled come the rapture, I suggest you find a way to return the favor of silence during the day and allow me some sleep!" I dropped back into the cocoon of pillows that swaddle my head.

Not eight seconds later one of them said to the others, "He just woke me up, two hours ago, and there wasn't even a bomb."

In other news, it is the New Year here in Afghanistan. We got it about 11 hours before you all did, so as an old hand in this 2011, I have to tell you, I think it will be a good one. I have a good feeling about this year. I get to go home, not too far into it, and I think that things that seemed difficult last year will seem merely things that happen.