To be perfectly honest with you, I'm a little sick of being here, and it's mostly because my life in Afghanistan lacks the balance I try so hard to find in my life back home. Every day here revolves around very basic needs...water, food, safety, sleep (and once in a while coffee). I feel like I live and breathe Army tactics, which is getting really annoying. I dream about convoys and how to make them safer. I spend a lot of time walking around with guns, talking about guns, thinking about guns, and cleaning guns. I miss regular things.
Instead of correcting people's horrible spelling mistakes over here (and there are some absolutely ludicrous interpretations of the English language published by the U.S. Army all across base) I seem to spend time correcting their convoy tactics, or at least forcing them to explain the logic (or lack thereof) behind their decisions. It's probably the verge of a very bad day when it takes an Air Force personnel officer to ask those kinds of questions. Let's go ahead and stop thinking about that.
Lately life here feels a lot like how I imagine life on a submarine. I know that somewhere people I know and love are living their normal lives where they think about things that have nothing to do with wars and guns. But my new friends and I are here in Afghanistan where we may as well be 800 feet below the ocean. We can look out at our normal lives through a periscope (regular people may commonly refer to this apparatus as Skype), and we struggle to remember what it must feel like to eat a home cooked meal, to wash our clothes in an actual washing machine, or to have any amount of privacy.
No, none of us would change anything about being here (we do have each other, and that makes a huge difference), but it's certainly easy to feel isolated.
So instead of being 800 feet below the ocean, we're some 6,000 miles from the States...but the effect, as I imagine it, seems similar. I'm thankful every day for my incredible "shipmates" on Catalina Wine Mixer (the name of our team...and oddly enough our logo is a boat, but as usual I digress).
Living in a yellow submarine isn't half bad when your friends are all aboard. And in the end, that's what it's all about.
Lately life here feels a lot like how I imagine life on a submarine. I know that somewhere people I know and love are living their normal lives where they think about things that have nothing to do with wars and guns. But my new friends and I are here in Afghanistan where we may as well be 800 feet below the ocean. We can look out at our normal lives through a periscope (regular people may commonly refer to this apparatus as Skype), and we struggle to remember what it must feel like to eat a home cooked meal, to wash our clothes in an actual washing machine, or to have any amount of privacy.
No, none of us would change anything about being here (we do have each other, and that makes a huge difference), but it's certainly easy to feel isolated.
So instead of being 800 feet below the ocean, we're some 6,000 miles from the States...but the effect, as I imagine it, seems similar. I'm thankful every day for my incredible "shipmates" on Catalina Wine Mixer (the name of our team...and oddly enough our logo is a boat, but as usual I digress).
Living in a yellow submarine isn't half bad when your friends are all aboard. And in the end, that's what it's all about.
I know this isn't what you wanted me to get out of the post, but I've got to ask anyway.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the first word on the coffee cup? It's some adjective for "bean". Green? Cool? "Pork and..."? That picture is awesome, by the way. Great job finding a yellow wall to complement a post about a yellow submarine metaphor.