It's unseasonably warm today, with the sun shining bright and the air not crisp or cold at all but rather sweet and breezy, a mid-May day, perhaps, but not a late November one. Tonight it's supposed to drop 40 degrees, which may sound impossible if you've never been to Chicago where the weather can turn from tropical to arctic with a wind change. I've had an excellent mail day: the check from NPR came, and an incredible postcard drawing from Doc. How lucky I am!

It's been days since I've written, in part because of the holiday (wasn't that fun!) but also because of my ongoing ceiling saga, soon to be remedied when my contractor tears apart the existing one tomorrow morning. My neighbor will not even let me buy her carpets, and so here we are. I am going to propose to the board that new rules and regulations are adopted that will force her to buy some of her own (and make her subject to fines if she continues to come home at 3, 4, 5 in the morning making a racket like she did again Saturday night), though meanwhile I will spend thousands to have my ceiling soundproofed as much as it can be, which admittedly isn't much because it really needs to happen on her end. Six years with no problems and now this. Got to love city living!

Pero basta. I've had it with the ceiling, the ceiling, the ceiling, as I'm sure everyone who knows me has too. Enough already!

Thanksgiving I spent at my mom's with two of our friends who own the gallery where my mother is represented. We had a traditional turkey, etc. meal and around dessert time my friends Molly and Eric came by with their darling son Etienne. It was so good to see them, to hear their stories. And Etienne! He's such a doll. Though he's only sixteen months he talks up a storm and can go up and down stairs on his own. On Saturday I saw them again. I took them to a couple of south side neighborhoods -- Pilsen and Bridgeport -- then we went to my friends' house for the most delicious sweet potato pie I've ever had (and that's the truth, Maria!). It was more fun than I've had in months.

S has been out of the bush for the past few days so we've talked on the phone several times. He had the hardest, most dangerous mission of his deployment: firefights, rockets, two of his soldiers nearly killed. I miss him so much and he's desperate to come home. We're down to just 80 more days. He's been living in extremely primitive conditions (no water, no electricity, etc.) that has only recently gotten better because of his and his partner's initiatives. They had the water pump repaired and purchased a new water heater (the old one held only 10 gallons). Right now he is back with the special forces for a few days, so he can email and call unlike at his new base. He's ready to be done with it all and I'm ready too. It will be great to have him home again.

The past couple of days I read "The Kite Runner" because too many people had told me I should. It's a compelling story, but it is way too contrived, and the writing is, frankly, rather pedestrian. Over and over I found myself rolling my eyes, letting out a heavy sigh because what came next was exactly what I had expected to come next and the telling of it was so plain. The book is not subtle. The emotions are placed right on the page, out in the open, requiring absolutely no work at all. No passages jumped out at me and held me for minutes, even longer, as passages in my favorite books do.

Several times the narrator talked about how his writing teachers admonished the use of cliches but how he liked them and therefore used them: "Here is another cliche my creative writing teacher would have scoffed at; like father, like son. But it was true, wasn't it?" Why even include such lines? Why not let us see through the action and beauty of the prose that yes, the father and son were similar, rather than telling it to us? And then why tell it to us in the frame of cliche?

I have no doubt "Kite Runner" will be made into a film and unless they hire a know-nothing director the film will be better than the book. Am I the only one who feels this way? I wonder because the book received excellent reviews and so far everyone I know who read it loved it.

Soy como un chile verde, llorona, picante pero sabroso, and that's just the way it is.

I purchased two excellent CDs this weekend: Chavela Vargas' "Sentimiento de Mexico" and Corey Harris' "Daily Bread." If I could, I'd sprinkle some of these beautiful songs right here on my blog so everyone could hear them.

So that's it. All caught up. I hope to get back in the frequent posting rhythm this week. More to come!

The spectacle on capitol hill yesterday was another pathetic, dark mark on our so-called democracy. This made me incredibly pissed:

At one point in the emotional debate, Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.

"He asked me to send Congress a message - stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message - that cowards cut and run, Marines never do," Schmidt said. Murtha is a 37-year Marine veteran and ranking Democrat on the defense appropriations subcommittee.

So it will never end, this smearing of vets who disagree with the hawkish chickens in power. Is it any wonder at all that most want to get out of the military and stay out?

I wasn't surprised that the Iraq vet who Schmidt quoted was an officer, but I was surprised that he'd said anything at all. I had this image of marines being loyal to each other. S was a marine right out of high school. He has always had this dual loyalty to the marines and the rangers, which is quite unusual -- most stick to one and badmouth the other. But then, now everything is different. Everything is tinged with political opinion. Facts no longer exist. Slobs like Dennis Hastert can call decorated war veterans like Murtha cowards and the only consequence is young veterans agree with Hastert instead of defending Murtha. We're swimming in a poisoned pie and it's made us sick. We see everything through a fever-induced haze and therefore we see only hallucinations, if we see anything at all.

Early this morning, before the sun had risen all the way up in the sky, S called me from deep in the mountains via satellite phone. We talked briefly. He wanted me to know he was okay and that he would be out on this same mission until after Thanksgiving at least. It was great to talk to him, even if I was in a middle-of-the-night daze. I dreamt vividly last night, probably because I'd spent the evening watching stupid movies on television. I ought to have just read instead of wasting hours on nothing.

In that daze, I forgot to tell him about the All Things Considered essay. How silly was that?

I just talked to S briefly. He called on his unit's sat phone. He's back in "marineland" somewhere near Asadabad. His new base is so rustic they have to drive down a treacherous road to Asadabad just to use a computer. He's going to be out on another long Marine mission and won't be able to contact me much if at all. He's going to try to call me before the mission is over. It could be a week, it could be two weeks or longer. He doesn't know. It was so good to hear his voice. I'm worried about him, but not because of the "Stephanie nightmare." I'm worried because the last time he went on one of these long, dangerous missions he came back incredibly stressed. And I'm worried because I know these missions are dangerous.

His voice sounds so sweet to me. I get greedy for it. If I can't have him here with me then I want his voice with me all the time. If I could, I'd be on the phone with him throughout the day, sharing all of these little house frustrations and all this foolishness with him. I can't wait for him to come home.

There has been one nightmare this year, one that I've had more than once. The last time was Halloween night. It is the dream of S coming home only to leave me for another woman, a woman he met in Afghanistan or somewhere between here and there. A woman named Stephanie.

The puzzling thing about this dream is that S is not a cheater and he is never around women. Truly. Afghan women are shrouded from view, hidden in their bedrooms, herded through streets by their uncles and fathers and husbands. They are ghosts. And S is in a Ranger unit. Women are not allowed to go to Ranger school. He works with men exclusively. Lives with men, eats with men, runs missions with men. My subconscious worry is irrational, but then it is a subconscious worry. Still I wake up from this dream disturbed and angry, angry that S has put me through this at all.

One of the things that first attracted us to each other was our shared sense of true loyalty. It still transcends everything. We rarely argue. I've only slept on the couch a couple of nights the past six years and that was in our first year of marriage when he decided to become a Chicago police officer and he was actually going to do it. He'd passed all the exams, gone through the background check, been interviewed by a couple of detectives, neither who were half as smart as S. He was unhappy with his job as a chemical engineer. He was desperate for a change. We worked out with cops and federal agents and firefighters, and they filled both of us with stories about "the job" and how it offered security, financial stability, and "excitement." Because of his military training, he didn't see any other options for himself except law enforcement, so he first applied to the DEA and the FBI. He passed all of the written exams and physical tests for both agencies easily and quickly. He wanted the DEA position because it involved travel (even if that travel was to war-torn Colombia) and because he thought their agents were smarter, more down-to-earth than the FBI agents he'd met. And then he told the truth about his past drug use and he was nixed. Later, one of the agents we'd met told him that no one ever tells the truth, but it was too late. S didn't bother with the FBI because they seemed like an agency dead-set on having only the most mediocre agents they could find. Our karate instructor, a gang crimes specialist with the CPD, convinced S that he should become a Chicago cop instead, and so he applied.

I wasn't bothered by the idea of S becoming a federal agent. In fact it sort of excited me. I had this vision of joining him later and the two of us hunting down serial rapists or Medellin drug runners. I was a fighter then. I trained all the time. I was confident in my body and like other amateur athletes, I had fantasies of testing myself beyond hard training sessions and little bare-knuckle karate tournaments. I even went so far as to send in the preliminary FBI application, though as soon as I got a letter back from them I realized how ridiculous it all was, especially since I was in my final year of my MFA program (yes, MFA and FBI...insanity), so I threw it out and stopped thinking about it. But S was desperate for change. When he decided to apply for CPD, I thought it was a fine idea, though deep inside it worried me. I wanted to be supportive, so I was. At first.

I'd known more cops than S. I was part of the "inner circle" of my gym. As the first female student of my gang crimes specialist instructor to get a black belt, I was afforded certain privileges. The day after my black belt exam, a five-hour ordeal that included a weight-lifting warm-up, 500 squats, a couple hundred push-ups (and not "girl" push-ups, thank you), a zillion sit-ups and standing basics, breaking boards, 22 kata (including three weapons), and 30 rounds of sparring against men (10 rounds each of bare-knuckle, full-contact karate, muay thai, and grappling), my teacher brought me into his office, a cramped space wallpapered with polaroids of dead and busted gangsters and cops holding confiscated guns and rifles, a giant bucket full of shanks and improvised weapons right next to the door, and he told me I was now part of the "inner circle" and that anywhere I went in the world I had people I could call on. It was so "godfather" it made me chuckle, though I knew he was being serious. "Roll with the dogs long enough you're bound to get fleas," he used to tell me, and I knew it was true just by seeing this gang crimes specialist act so much like a gangster. Our Christmas dinners were held at a local red sauce Italian place whose owner was famous for his garage filled with Ferraris, and my teacher would sit at the end of a long table there and hand out gifts and blessings to all of us who were lucky enough to be there, all the time sucking on a genuine Havana cigar. He was a capital-letter Gangster.

After becoming part of this "inner circle" suddenly I was included in conversations, conversations that over the years included more and more stories of "the street." Cops love to tell stories. They exaggerate. They probably lie. The stories expand with each telling, become mythic and too large, though usually they are based on truth. Many of the stories I heard scared the crap out of me. There were stories of housing project "sweeps," invasions to ostensibly look for drugs and felons. There were stories of finding decapitated bodies and bodies so decomposed they had literally become one with the chairs and carpets. There was a story of finding a dead man on the thirteenth floor of a highrise at Stateway Gardens housing project, and since the man was large and the elevators were broken, they threw him out the window. The funny part, I was told, was that there was a tree and the body got stuck in the tree so these cops, cops I knew and trained with, had to call the fire department to come and get the body unstuck so they could put it in the paddy wagon for the long drive to the morgue.

I understand the need for gallows humor. I know it can cut through the horror, make it speakable, and often horrors need to be spoken of if only to get them out of our heads. But to me, the horror of this story was not the cops finding a dead man. These cops had found plenty. It was how disrespectful they had been of this dead man. They threw a man out a window as if he were a bag of garbage or moldy drywall. It made me nauseous with regret and left me with this gripping tingle in my stomach that I'd let myself become a part of something wicked and wrong, and that even if I enjoyed the workouts, even if I got a sort of high from teaching young women how to trust their bodies and defend themselves in dangerous situations, that all the good had been thrown out that Stateway Gardens window.

When I was told that story, I was working part-time at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the organization I would later direct and the one I am volunteering for now, and I was assisting two workshops in the vacinity of Stateway Gardens, one of the housing projects that lined State Street from 35th to 75th until the "transformation" of the past decade tore them all down. One of our workshops was held at a small library directly across the street from the highrises, the same highrises where that man lived, and I could see the bedraggled and half-dead trees that surrounded the buildings whenever I went to the workshop, and I could see the children who ran among them, circled them and climbed them. I knew women and men who lived at Stateway. I heard their stories of police abuse, of those "sweeps" and of cops pissing in their hallways, trashing their bedrooms, extorting money from their neighbors. And so when I was told that story of the man thrown out the window, I knew I could have known that man. He could have been a writer who stopped by the group or perhaps an audience member at one of our readings. He very well could have been the grandfather of one of the writers I knew, or an uncle to their kids. He was without a doubt their neighbor.

I couldn't get the image out of my mind, the image of that man in that tree and the dozens and dozens of children who lived there too, some of whom had to have seen that man in that tree, and their parents too, who also must have seen that man. I thought about what horror it must have been to witness this end-of-the-century lynching of a dead man. And I thought about how it was told with a "funny part."

There were stories about corruption floating around the city, as bands of crooked cops were caught on all sides of the city. One gang ran drugs from Nashville to the south side on their shifts. Another handcuffed west side residents while they robbed them, being so brazen as to do it all in uniform. Another gang stalked the immigrant bars in my neighborhood, shook down illegals for cash and then pooled the money for weekend gambling trips to Vegas. They managed that racket for a decade before the FBI finally caught them, and if I remember right, they only got caught because one of them told the story to the wrong person.

I was supportive of S changing careers. I knew he was miserable. I was even supportive of him becoming a cop, at least until he was about to get hired. Then suddenly I was scared to death that he would become a part of that world, turned into a capital-letter Gangster. It didn't seem escapable to me. Since he knew our teacher and he knew these other cops, how could he not end up working with them, and if he did, how could he not end up horribly tarnished and ruined by the experience? I talked to him about the hours and how crappy they were. I talked to him about the man in the tree and the corruption and how impossible it was to escape it, and how dangerous it was to try. He told me that he believed the only way to change something for the better was from the inside and that if more "good" people like him became cops the less corruption and wickedness there'd be. I told him that "good" people didn't stay good in that job. They got corrupted or they got out, or they got bored because the only jobs that didn't expose them to all that crap were the boring jobs. This was a couple of years before "Training Day," but I didn't need to point to a movie as an example. The examples were all around us. S just needed to see them.

When the projects started coming down, one cop I knew said they "weren't fun anymore," because now there were no more gun fights in the courtyards, no more sweeps and battles. I think my cynicism grew tenfold when he told me that. It was growing steadily while S was in the process of becoming a cop, and it grew so deep that I couldn't stand to sleep in the same bed as him anymore so I slept on the couch. Yes, I'd been supportive at first. Yes, it was a crazy turnabout to be against it, but it came out of this overwhelming fear of losing him and losing our nascient marriage. I didn't see us making it if he ended up throwing dead men out of windows, or even driving the bodies of those men to the morgue. He told me again and again how he'd "never do that" and I believed him, but I also knew that there would be times when he'd have no choice, when the job would demand that he abandon himself, and in doing, abandon me.

S decided not to become a cop. Perhaps because I slept on the couch, or perhaps because the thought of working with people like the cops we knew was just too much for him, or perhaps because he knew it would not be intellectually or spiritually fulfilling the way archaeology has become. For whatever reason, he chose to abandon the thought of that job instead of abandoning me and our marriage.

And so there it is. The crux of the nightmare. I'm not afraid of S abandoning me for "Stephanie." I'm afraid he will abandon me for the military. I feel this most accutely when I get an email from him like the one in Houston with the big gun, one that seems to be from a man I don't really know, a man who could be standing up in that window. I felt betrayed when he signed that contract a year and a half ago. I felt like he'd chosen his army buddies over me, because I knew he would get called up even if he was sure he wouldn't. I know he wishes upon wish now that he could go back in time and erase his signature from that contract. And I no longer feel betrayed, at least not during my waking life. Soon after he was called up, I decided that if I were to be angry at him over this, resent him, then we might as well not be married anymore. I decided our marriage was worth saving. I've only been in love twice in my life, and the first time was nothing like this. I know real love is rare and it's worth these months filled with worry and "Stephanie" nightmares. I know he won't abandon me for "Stephanie." It is just in those minutes before I wake up to the pitter-pat of my neighbor's footfalls, those minutes when I hover between my two selves, only halfway in this world, that I worry.

I talked to S this morning and according to his super-duper excel spreadsheet he has only 99 more days in country. Wow!

Tomorrow he leaves the special forces FOB for one farther south. The new base has no internet and no cellphone service, so he won't be able to contact me very often, probably just once a week or so via satellite phone. He will be working with marines again, who he says are highly motivated soldiers with lame-ass leadership, not unlike every other branch of the military these days. Unfortunately for S, he has to deal with their leadership all the time, planning joint missions of marines/ANA. Oh well.

It's been great getting to talk to him the past couple of days. Hopefully we'll talk again in the morning before he heads out. I keep meaning to post the photos he sent me, but time escapes me these days. I've been busy busy busy. Perhaps tomorrow.

"So I want to ask, why is your husband's name on your outgoing message? I mean, he's not there to answer it or anything..."

Yesterday I went to the zen temple down near the Whole Foods on Ashland for the first time in months. I've meditated a handful of times in my house since my previous visit, but my practice has been erratic at best. On Saturday night I knew that if I did nothing else on Sunday I should to go to the morning meditation session. And so I did.

I don't sleep well without S and even less well with my new neighbor and her hammering away on my ceiling, her steps here her steps there, her dog's scritch-scratch patternmaking across the floor. I woke up when my neighbor came home around 2 or so in the morning, then again when she got up to take the dog out around 7. Since I fell back asleep, I didn't leave the house until 9:30, the same time the first gong sounds to begin. I got there a half hour late, snuck into the main room and sat on one of the chairs that were lined up behind the lines of cushions toward the back. The chairs are for people whose knees can't handle sitting down on the cushion and for people like me, late people who don't want to disturb the sitters by walking in front of them or tripping over the knees of the taller folks whose legs are just too long.

The Sunday morning service consists of two 20-minute meditation sessions, some chanting, and a little sermonette at the end where everyone gathers together on the floor and the meditation leader discusses a topic, perhaps reads a poem or two, and then gives the announcements. The sessions are perfectly quiet. Everyone tries to sit still (there are always some fidgeters) and the purpose is to try to stop thinking about anything at all except the fact that you are breathing. It's hard. Really hard. Especially if you're tired or distracted, or like me, always battling the revision of past conversations and the fantasies of future ones. In my mind I will run through every possible scenario for any given situation, even situations that have yet to come to pass. And there are endless possibilities. Even when I sleep my nights are cluttered with subconscious chatter, dreams and images and scenarios, an endless stream of one after another. It's exhausting, which is why zen teaches that you're only truly at rest when you're meditating even though you're wide awake and sitting up with your back straight, your legs tangled together, and your eyes open. When I concentrate on my breathing and stop all that patter for even a few moments I see things just a little more clearly than before. It's a wonder to me why I don't do it more often when I know it's so good for me, but then I guess I'm not the first to know what I should do and not do it anyway.

Yesterday's sermonette seemed to have no real direction, which is not so unusual. Every time I've gone to the Sunday service I tell myself that the next time I'll skip out before the little get-together starts. Every time, though, I stay anyway because I think that perhaps this time will be different, this time the sermonette will be filled with insight and send me off for the rest of my day thinking about how beauty is found in impermanence or how change is inevitable and it's okay. Yesterday's sermonette was too much like a sermon for me. It was about how we have to eat right and not be promiscuous and "take care of the earth" and all that other blah blah blah, platitudes that sermons from all religions fall back on out of laziness, I guess, laziness on the part of the sermon givers and the listeners. I'm not promiscuous. I already eat fine. Anyone who's meditating at a zen temple already knows we've got to "take care of the earth." The whole thing seemed like a thrown-together, thoughtless preaching-to-the-converted little speech. It left me feeling empty.

I drove back home from the temple and the heavy clouds above me moved swiftly toward the lake as if the wind were pulling her thick winter blanket across the sky. Half way home the sun burned for a moment then slunk back under the covers, left the rest of the day that day-for-night that makes winter what it is. Autumn has been coming and going this past week. One day a January day, cold and dreary, the next, a late May or early June day, the sun shining so brightly through the half-bare trees the dingy city seems to sparkle even though the shadows are impossibly long and somber.

In the dark and dreary dead of winter S left, and in those first weeks I read and watched everything I could find about war, particularly our new twin wars that are crashing down like the twin towers they were meant to make up for. I bought Purple Hearts, a book of photographs of Iraq war vets with missing limbs, faces turned into craggily topographical maps from the flames of their burned-to-the-core humvees. I watched every Frontline special I could about the wars and the "soldier's heart" over the internet and cried when I thought of S having to kill someone in order not to be killed. I feverishly read several books about Afghanistan and poured over essays and polemics about our wars and our policy, analyzing it all on my blog and tearing apart arguments I found on the web. I went to the Op Truth website every day to read the accounts of soldiers who'd come back and veterans from our other meaningless war and I knew I was there on that site reading their stories and looking at their pictures because they reminded me of S. I watched C-Span religiously because it was only there that I could hear the stories of soldiers in our forgotten wars (Then it seemed Iraq was forgotten too. Now it is somewhat in our consciousness, even if Afghanistan is as far away as it ever was.). I remember seeing an interview with a Blackhawk pilot at Walter Reed seated next to her husband, who was also in the national guard, as she cradled the prosthetic for her leg in one hand and scratched her arm with the hook at the end of her other prosthetic. A RPG shot through the bottom of her helicopter and exploded, leaving her a one-armed, one-legged woman. They were deployed to Iraq at the same time, though they had different jobs so they weren't together when she was injured. During the weeks before their deployment they had talked about possibility of one of them dying and had made amends with each other, made decisions regarding how each would adapt without the other and go on. Yet they had not talked about injury. They hadn't anticipated it and didn't know what a one-legged, one-armed life would mean. She was dead set on getting back to flying, didn't want to leave the military, but the whole time she talked her husband stared down at the prosthetic in her lap. Only occasionally did he lift his eyes and look to the camera, and when he did his eyes were water-glazed and tired.

I've thought about the possibility of S being injured in Afghanistan, and since I mull over such things and fill my mind with endless possibilities, I've had dark dreams of how we'd make our house accessible if he came home in a wheelchair or if we'd have to move. I've thought about an article I saw in Dwell about building accessible kitchens and how the countertops need to be lowered and how drawers are better than cabinets. I've thought about what it would be like to have him come home a shell of his former self, his mind blown, literally, by a too strong blast. I've imagined his skin turned into the surface of a blown volcano from a flame-fired blast, wide swaths of spilled and hardened lava, lumps and waves and craters and creases where once there was nothing but smooth skin and hair follicles. I first imagined this in Killeen when I saw a soldier whose neck was that way. The gentle dip beneath his adam's apple had been turned into a snare of balled up yarn; across his neck were raised bumps of whip-borne slashes. I've imagined buying a modified car to fit a legless S in, or rigging our computer to translate voice to text if his hands and arms were gone. I've imagined all of this and I've known I could live with it all. I've known it would be horrible, overwhelmingly so. But I've known we could deal with it.

But that question. That question.

I've thought about it ever since it was posed to me last week by a radio producer who talked to me about writing something that may or may not ever air. I've thought about that question and why it bothered me so much, why it made me want to retreat and not write for days, why it made me want to hide away and hardly do anything at all. I thought about how I was confused when she asked me that question and incensed in the way I've become accustomed these past eight months because it seemed so lacking in empathy, so insensitive, even if that wasn't the intent. I thought that perhaps the producer had never been in love, had never had a true commitment to a live-in lover, let alone ever been separated from that person. But the question didn't just anger me, it also depressed me, made the cry-at-a-moment emotion that hovers in me all the time (I feel it behind my nose and in my throat and of course behind my eyes) envelope me finally, giving me no space outside of myself.

Until yesterday I couldn't articulate why that question had bothered me so much. I knew it had, and I could articulate my anger and even my puzzlement, but I didn't know why it had made me feel so bad. After meditating yesterday morning, though, it came up in me, the obvious reason why. That question brought up the ultimate worry, the one and only worry. The one of S being gone forever, lost to me in Afghanistan and dead there.

There are only a few reasons why I'd take his name off our outgoing message: he left me or I left him, our marriage lost to that dubious statistic of "50% of all marriages fail," or he was lost to that even worse statistic, that growing number of soldiers killed in action. That question brought up the worst that could happen. It made me imagine a time when too much time had passed after his death, when I would be urged by friends and family to finally get his name off the machine, when I'd know myself it was time because it was really over and he was never coming back. And the thought of that was too much.

It seems the Latin Kings have taken over our neighborhood gang, UAC, and now they're tagging the neighborhood, leaving cryptic drawings on the sides of buildings, up and down the olive drab mail collection bin on our corner. Last week "they", those anonymous someones, went down the street with a baseball bat or perhaps a wrench or perhaps with their fists covered in gloves, and broke the passenger-side windows of five parked cars. The road was coated in the gem-clutter of shattered tempered glass until the street cleaners came. That gem-clutter was like a decorative trim next to the sewer waters that have been backing up along our curb and the dead leaf muck that is mixed with it.

Doesn't that producer know I am like a car window, really just a collection of gem-clutter pieces ready to shatter apart? That I am no different than that pile of glass pearls crushed on the side of the road?

I've still not written anything for the radio program. I'm not sure how to begin. I might go back and look at what I've written and adapt it anyway, even though she asked me not to. I'll try to settle my mind tomorrow morning and then get to work. Or perhaps decide to skip it and get back to what really matters to me, the chronicling of all this gem-clutter laying waste on the side of the road.

It's a day-for-night day today, dark and quiet and just a little bit rainy. A plane just flew overhead and it sounded unbelievably loud because the sound travels so quickly when the air is steady, and the buffer of tree leaves is more than half-way lessened now that so many have fallen to the ground. On my way back to my car this afternoon I walked in a goldenrod tunnel, the trees above me and the ground below me both the color of daylight, when I took a shortcut through Grant Park. The city is becoming its sad gray of winter, my neighborhood its own sad brown. The white trim around the front door across the street appears whiter than usual because everything else is so dark.

I went to a reading by the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the organization I used to run, for the Chicago Humanities Festival downtown. I saw some of my old friends, writers I worked with for years and who I missed terribly when I was down in New Orleans. Charlie, who is one of the best poets I've ever known; Sharon, who is a poet and essayist and an adjunct college teacher constantly looking for work (we often share stories); and Virdajean, dear Virdajean, who saw me and said she would cook me greens as soon as the first frost hits because I'm looking too skinny and my eyes too sad. "Where's the sparkle in your eyes?" she asked me, and I told her about my last few months and then we hugged again.

S is packing up and moving south. His base is to be closed up for the winter since it is at the foot of the Hindu Kush and already the wind is starting to rush through the mountains and push against their buildings and tents. He'll be working with marines again, this time just a handful of kilometers from the Pakistan border. The special forces base was smaller and safer and better equipped. I'd hoped he could stay but he can't. It is back to the same-old of the past year, more danger, less equipment, and working, again, with the less-experienced, embarrassingly young marines. S was a marine when he was their age and like them he thought he knew what he was doing. Now he knows better.

Later I'll post a few pictures S sent me that show how Afghan bread is made. Ramadan is over, Eid is over. Afghanistan, too, is settling in for the dark days of winter.

I was able to talk to S this morning for a half hour, joy upon joy. He told me that yesterday he and his kandak drove on a road that had been turned into a riverbed by flash flood rains, and how halfway to their destination they had to get out of their Ford Ranger pick-up and lift it up, literally, and move it in order to get it unstuck. He said it was the worst road he'd ever seen, and that says something given some of the roads he's seen in Afghanistan. He is still at the same tiny Forward Operating Base, waiting with the uncertainty that's become certain since he's been back in-country. Every day he is told they may be moving to a new FOB and that this move may be happening in the next week or it may be happening in the next few hours. During our conversation he was interrupted and when he came back he said that he expects every interruption to be the one that says "pack your gear." Today it was just a warning that the ANA would be doing a live fire exercise in a few minutes and that he should expect to hear some loud explosions. We certainly did.

S would rather not move. He's moved enough. Since arriving in Afghanistan in mid-February, he has switched FOBs a half dozen times. He's been at this FOB for nearly two months, the longest he's been at one FOB and with the same kandak, platoon, of ANA soldiers since his deployment began. This is his fifth group of ANA. With every new group comes a "break-in" period of introductions and evaluations, and often a new interpreter too. These "break-in" days are filled with mutual distrust and trepidation as the troops feel their way through S's leadership and he learns about their past training and their commitment to soldiering. The attrition rates are high. With each group he loses at least 25%, especially when they are brand new to the military. One day these soldiers are at the base training, the next they've disappeared. Unfortunately they take their uniforms and equipment with them and often sell the gear at local markets. The uniforms are then bought by insurgents or civilians, making it all the more difficult to tell who's "friendly" and who isn't. This has become such a problem that they now issue only one uniform per soldier. I can imagine how stinky those uniforms become late in the week.

Even when S inherits an already trained kandak, there is still this period of introduction and evaluation. One group he worked with had been trained by national guard troops who had rotated back home. They were so worthless, S told me, that he had to start all over with them beginning with basic infantry skills and physical fitness regimens. It was overwhelmingly frustrating for him, working with soldiers who had trained for months but learned nothing, most likely because their training had been so worthless. I worry about him most during these break-in days. The only way he can find out if the new soldiers are trustworthy is to take them out on dangerous raids and missions.

He trusts the soldiers he works with at this FOB, and he trusts the Americans, a small group of Special Forces soldiers, he works with too. They have requested that S and his group be allowed to stay because they prefer working with them, having worked with so many of those less-than-well-trained troops over the past year. They have a good working relationship, and though the missions they go on are more dangerous than those S did several months ago at his last FOB, I worry about him less because of the confidence he has in the men he works with. The uncertainty is tempered by the trust he has in them.

The entire country is flush with rumors, no doubt because of all of this uncertainty and the constant change of direction and orders from the military brass. Throughout S's base float the rumor of all rumors, the one tinged with hope and desire and longing, the rumor of an early end to their deployment. "We'll be home before Christmas," they tell S over and over again. He doesn't believe it, of course. "They've been saying 'They'll send us home for Christmas' since Christmas became a holiday," S told me. "Soldiers have been singing 'I'll Be Home for Christmas' songs since the Civil War."

This hope, this faith, that the brass will suddenly become kind-hearted and warm and fuzzy is almost comical given that when S was called up last November he was first ordered to report for duty two days before Thanksgiving, then after a huge stink (they are national guard troops after all and need more than a week to deploy for a year) they were ordered to report a week before Christmas on December 18. This was a "report for duty" in Ft. Hood, Texas, which meant he was actually going to have to leave our house on the 16th. S and the other called-up soldiers knew they wouldn't actually start training until after Christmas, but when they pointed this out the brass said it didn't matter, they had to be at Ft. Hood on the 18th anyway, even if it meant they were stuck on the fort alone with nothing to do. We decided that I would fly down to Texas to spend the holiday with him, for though neither of us is religious (in fact neither of us has any faith at all), we fall for the family-fun of the holiday and wanted to spend it together.

I booked a flight for Christmas, $440 on American, and S and I hurriedly finished out our semesters in New Orleans, packed up many of our things (I'd return several times afterwards to collect most of the boxes, my last trip just one week before Katrina), and drove to Chicago. Our renter, a good friend of ours, moved out just days before we moved back in and, lucky for us, left the place spotless. We bought a Christmas tree and decorated it within a couple of days, placing on top of it a Nigerian mask our friend Rebecca had brought back for us the previous summer. We decided we'd celebrate Christmas together, even if it was weeks before the actual day.

Four days or so before he was set to deploy, the military brass changed their minds. They suddenly realized how silly and cruel it was to send these men off to an empty Ft. Hood days before Christmas and decided to let them stay at home. His new deployment date was December 28, far more reasonable, putting him in Texas by the 30th. I called American to see if I could get a refund or an exchange, but they said no. I'd bought the ticket on Priceline (the regular price was close to $1000) and they said that I'd have to go through Priceline if I wanted to get any money back. I called Priceline and they said "policy is policy," and then basically to go to hell. (I'd find out over the next few months that this was the kind of treatment you can expect if your loved one is serving in one of our wars. The myth of "support our troops" is just that, a myth.) That little bit of military uncertainty and incompetence cost us $440, which added up with all of the money we've spent on equipment as basic as tools for fixing trucks, topped over $1,500 months ago.

It's not the money I worry about when it comes to the military's uncertainty. It's S's safety. The uncertainty reflects how little planning has been put into this war, our supposed primary front on the "War on Terror." It also reflects how little forsight there is on the ground, how out of touch much of the leadership is with what's going on at these far away FOBs. They play mix-and-match with ETTs and ANA kandaks and shuffle board with FOBs. There is no logic, no forsight. Only happenstance. How can S build proper relationships with his ANA soldiers when they are moved and replaced so often? How can he develop good relationships with other Americans, including the officer he's paired with, when they too are moved around and replaced? He's worked with two different officer partners this year, though his first partner was activated with him and is still in country. They have split up his unit and scattered them across the Afghanistan, and then paired each of them up with mix-and-match officers at mix-and-match FOBs. There is no consistency and constant uncertainty. It doesn't make any sense.

One of the reasons soldiers stay in the military even during war time is because of the loyalty they feel for each other and the guilt and desperation they feel when their buddies are deployed and they're still at home. This guilt, this desperation, led S to reenlist for a year when most of his unit was called up well over a year ago. He signed up to help them out after he'd been out of the military for a year. They called and said that they had no one left in the states to train new members and the unit would fall apart without a qualified person to train them. The unit has a long history. It is the only national guard infantry unit to be activated during Vietnam. As a Ranger unit, it is also tied to the history of the Rangers generally. Their unit, a long range surveillance detachment, is like the one in "Saving Private Ryan."

Of course, they had no intention of having him stay in the states and train new members. That became clear just a couple of months after he signed the contract when we received that crack-of-dawn call, that call that threw us into these endless months of uncertainty. And though the unit has a long history, it is no longer what it was. The experienced soldiers like S are getting out as soon as they're allowed to. They have no sense of that reputed loyalty, that 'brotherhood,' because they were splintered apart and scattered. I'm sad about this for S; I think his deployment would be easier if he were with his buddies, men he's known for more than a decade. But I'm glad for me. He doesn't have the guilt that drives so many disenchanted soldiers to reenlist anyway. I don't think he'll ever sign another "stay at home and train new soldiers for a year" contract again. I think he'll say no to a contract based on rumor.

When S left for Afghanistan eight months ago I asked him to buy me a burkha. A bluebird-blue burkha like those worn by the amorphous shadow-women I thought of when I thought of our sisters in Afghanistan. In March he obliged me. I wore it around the house for a few moments -- I honestly couldn't stand it for more than that -- then stuffed it up on one of our closet's top shelves to sit next to the other cultural relics he's sent me, like the water-logged-sand-wool hat the men wear and a blood red velvet coat with frilly gold trim from what S calls "used to be Russia" Kyrzykstan. The burkha's symbolic power is undeniable: to those of us in the non- fundamentalist- Muslim "west", it represents all the pain and suffering some Afghan women live with every day, suffering that is imposed on them by the men in their lives. This may not be an accurate view (hopefully the women of Afghanistan will one day write their own burkha stories), but it is the one most of us have when we see photographs of those women-turned-feather-blue ghosts.

During our feverish fifteen days together a month ago when S filled my mind with stories about Afghanistan, he told me over and over how he had no real idea what it was like for women in Afghanistan because he so rarely saw any of them. When he did they were in their burkhas, usually in groups of two or more. One time he saw a group of women being herded through the streets of a village near Asadabad by an old man and his switch, his whipping stick, in a manner you might see a herder herding a group of belligerent cows. Another time he saw a woman in a burkha kick the crap out of a young boy. He said she was like one of those kung-fu heroes who transforms from a crotchety monk to a killer in seconds. S didn't see what happened the moments before the beating, so he had no idea what brought it about though it seemed to him like a reasonable response from a woman forced to wear a mummy shroud whenever she left the house.

To buy the burkha, S had to go into town and explore some of the markets. He'd been studying Dari since he purchased tapes after we'd been woken up by that early morning phone call that changed our lives in an instant. Not that it was easy to find Dari language instruction tapes or books. Farsi? Easy to find. Arabic? Everywhere. But the languages of Afghanistan, Dari, Pashto, were nowhere to be found in bookstores or the web. It took a serious search to find an academic series put out by the University of Nebraska that included pronunciation tapes. I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but I know it was around a hundred dollars and that didn't include the rushed shipping we required since it took us so long to find them. The same was true for books about our war. The "Current Affairs," "US Military History," and "World History" sections of every bookstore we visited were filled shelf by shelf with books about Iraq but there was very little to find about Afghanistan, and what there was tended to be about the Russian occupation and the Taliban terror that followed. Since he wasn't able to get the tapes until just days before he left for Ft. Hood, he wasn't able to study as much as he would have liked, but he still landed in Afghanistan with enough basic Dari to be cordial and count numbers. As it turns out most of the ANA troops he's worked with speak more Pashto than Dari, but his studies have helped him. He reads some Arabic now (the alphabet is the same) and he can ask enough questions not to get lost. And enough to buy a burkha.

The man who sold it to him was ecstatic to hear S was buying it for his wife. That is, until S told him that I had no intention of wearing it around town. The burkha he sent me is the standard issue pleated burkha. No fancy adornments, shiny polyester fabric. I suspect some are more beautiful than others, with the differentiations of class expressed in their stitching (hand- rather than machine-stitching) and the quality of the fabric. It is the only outward expression a woman's allowed, and though Afghanistan is the world's poorest country, surely their women are as interested in appearances as their men are, who hang tin dangles from their garden-tinted jingle trucks, and decorate their rifles with hand-painted flowers and swirly cues. When S came home for his visit, he brought back a couple of presents from the troops he trained, including a large box of green tea and a handmade sling shot, its handle adorned by colorful Czech-style beads.

Ambrose Bierce said "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," but then he died in Mexico during the run up to the First World War and therefore didn't get to see how little geography we learn today even when we're waging two wars at once. When S went to Ft. Hood for his "train-up" in December, he was "briefed" after a month of non-training (he and his Ranger buddies worked out on their own; the national guard leadership had no interest in anything other than eating chicken at Popeye's) by a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. When S and his friend questioned this, asking why they weren't being briefed by a soldier who had served in Afghanistan, the briefer said "What's the difference? They're all in the Middle East." S pointed out that no, Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East, it's in Asia, and then the briefer said incredulously, "Well they're all Arabs, aren't they?!" No surprise, then, that S was the only soldier in his entire group who had studied any Dari at all. In fact, he was the only one who knew Afghans spoke Dari, not Farsi, not Arabic. He was stuck in Ft. Hood for nearly two agonizing months.

I took out the burkha today and took a few pictures from the view inside. I was thinking about how quickly the change came in Afghanistan, how in an historical instant the women became shrouded. The Taliban took over with their medieval politics and 21st century hyper-fast violence, and then, then. Imagine: women had been teaching in universities, performing surgeries in hospitals, running restaurants and shops and negotiating deals, and then suddenly nothing. Not allowed to take a breath outside unless hidden from view, and even then running the risk of being beaten, or worse, executed. It's the image of those women in the center of the soccer stadium, their beautiful bodies turned into sky-blue mountains then reduced to blue rubble when the shots were fired, that I see when I look at my burkha.

I wonder if the women of Afghanistan were stunned into submission, if it all happened so swiftly it gave them no chance to save themselves, to change the course of events. We weren't engaged in our war, hadn't learned any geography yet let alone the words for "sorrow" and "outrage" and "injustice" in Dari, so though we knew they had been transformed from women into shadows we didn't truly notice them and therefore we did nothing. Most of the women of Afghanistan are still hidden from view behind mud-brick walls and blue polyester shrouds. Laura Bush lauds the "freedom" of Afghan women now that "democracy" has come to their country. She offers up empty rhetoric to fill the dead space around her husband's morally bankrupt presidency. I wonder, will we be just as stunned when our rights are taken away from us? I ask because it seems we're at one of those moments now, a moment when things could change drastically if we don't prevent it. And once the change happens, it takes more than translated abstract nouns to change it back.


Looking at my back door from inside the burkha.

S called me this morning, a relief. I assumed he had been out on missions and I was right. Hopefully he'll be able to call again in the next couple of days, but so much is uncertain that he could call again tomorrow or not again until next week. We talked about the absence of news from Afghanistan (and Iraq, for that matter) and how this makes me worry more because I'm never sure if the violence has occurred in his province or not. He hadn't heard about the UK soldier killed in Masar-e-Sharif yesterday, a town he'd heard was completely safe. We are living in this time of nanopods and laptop computers, yet there is still such a basic lack of information when it comes to this war.

And then there is Iraq. On Tuesday the nation mourned the 2,000th American soldier killed. Since then another eighteen have died. Eighty-five this month. We have become numb to it, clearly, and remain disinterested. I can't help but think this is a product of our abstraction of the war and the men and women who are fighting it. But then, perhaps it's even more banal, a simple reflection of our preference for meaningless, shiny fictions and their matching accessories available at our local Target stores. Libby may go down but it won't matter if we're still waging this war with no plan. He'll be just another crony caught for a moment only to be released back into the world with his own Fox TV show or Clear Channel radio program. I imagine he'll meet our other infamous traitors, Ollie North and Liddy, to compare show notes on Monday mornings at the corner deli, or perhaps via conference call while they're served their heart healthy oatmeal and black coffee by their loyal trophy wives.

It is all the more offensive after seeing Operation: Dreamland last night, a more pointed and direct film than Gunner Palace. The film follows one squad from the 82nd Airborne based in Falluja in the spring of 2004 before the Marines retreated then invaded again and flattened the city. The plan is nowhere, not on the ground with the squad, not in the officers' planning room. At one point we see the squad's leaders sitting around reviewing the past missions and the captain giving the presentation asks the group what exactly the squad is securing on these missions. Someone suggests the government, and the captain asks if they really are securing the mosques and the local leaders, and if so why since they aren't in any danger anyway. Then he asks if they are merely keeping themselves secure, and if that's not it, then what was the purpose of these missions. No one could answer him, and finally he answers it himself: "I don't know."

No one knows what the hell is going on. That sums up the agonizing truth in the film. The raids seem pointless, the missions without end. When we saw the planning room captain say he didn't know what the purpose of the missions his men were risking their lives to perform was, the entire theater let out a "humph" sigh, a resignation tinged with anger over the futility of it all. This futility wasn't lost on the men, of course, though most were steady in their assertion that they were "doing the job" and would continue to until they were out of the army. Getting out is no easy matter, as S and I can attest to. They coerce like crazy and then lay on the guilt. In one scene we see a room full of exhausted, fed-up soldiers while an officer stands in front of them making the pitch for reenlistment. He begins by asking who had already told their commanders they wouldn't sign back up and nearly the entire room raised their hands. Then he asked them if they had jobs lined up when they got home, whether they had paid off all their loans and car payments, whether they had a place to live or if they had to move back into their mama's house, and whether the same bad kids were still in their neighborhood, the neighborhood they escaped when they joined the military. Nearly everyone raised there hands again, a cue for a second officer to step up and continue the pitch. Afterwards Sgt. Pacheco, a medic from Chicago (who was at the earlier screening last night for Q&A -- unfortunately we missed him), said he was sick of the officers hounding them every day, making them go to meeting after meeting (with the ubiquitous, amateurish PowerPoint presentations S has told me about), when they'd already made up their minds to get the hell out. Yes, it is a "voluntary army" (except those stop-lossed soldiers who are included in the reenlistment numbers), but the amount of coercion is as prodigious as the number of lies told to soldiers to get them to reenlist, let alone to enlist the first time.

The film is unbelievably depressing. We see the escalating violence and distrust of the Iraqis during the film and aren't surprised when the ending credits tell us the city burst open in the months afterwards, the insurgency taking hold of the community and erupting in unbelievable violence. (The story of how we took the city back will be told one day, I suspect, and it may be another story that is impossible to find pride in even if its outcome was inevitable.) The men the film follows are outspoken politically and about as divided on the war as the nation is overall. Most of them came to the army because they didn't know what else to do with themselves and were worried that they'd end up in jail or worse. And all of the men in the squad were under thirty.

This is Chicago's national public radio station's fall fund drive so yesterday they had a "three hour marathon" of This American Life. One of the stories was about the Johns Hopkins study published in Lancet and released days before the election last year that estimated the number of civilian deaths since the invasion in 2003. The researchers, led by Les Roberts, estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war and that the vast majority of violent deaths were caused by coalition bombs and bullets. Because of the timing of the study's release, and the fact that Roberts was outspoken against the war, the study was discredited in the press and given little coverage. The study was said to be deeply flawed because the methodology was corrupt and the samples weren't random, but as the This American Life story demonstrates, the study's methodology was sound and the samples were completely random. In fact, Roberts is the world's leading researcher on war-caused civilian deaths and his studies of Congo and Kosovo are widely cited across the political spectrum (and by the government). It is only his Iraq study, which used identical techniques as his others, that is flawed, a curious coincidence given how "we don't do body counts."

To be as fair as possible, Roberts didn't include numbers from Falluja, though they had surveyed that city. The numbers of civilians killed during the seige were so high Roberts feared they would have inaccurately skewed the other results, so they only averaged the deaths in the thirty-one other communities they surveyed. Watching Operation:Dreamland I thought about those high numbers. I thought about how so many Iraqi families were torn apart, and how so many soldiers came home with their minds impossibly heavy with nightmares of the civilians they had killed. Of the 100,000 dead, more than 50% were women and children.

It's not that the Pentagon intends to kill civilians. They just don't much care when they do. Marc Galasco, one of the people in the This American Life story, had helped the Defense Department come up with its "high-value targeting" in Iraq before the start of the war, their attempt to lower the number of civilian deaths and increase the disruption to military infrastructure. Galasco was amazed that the Pentagon had no interest in counting the number of civilian deaths seeing that it was the surest way to test whether their "high-value targeting" had worked. Now Galasco works for Human Rights Watch in Iraq tracking down how many civilians have died there, which just shows that fiction has nothing on real life.

We're still in the foggy days of these wars, when we're desperate to document what is going on as it happens, unable to process it all because it's just too soon. Some day the stories, the truths, shuffling beneath these documentations will be told. I wonder, what will our children say about these wars? Or will we still be fighting them twenty years from now?

Anyone with a loved one fighting in our wars will tell you the silent days are the worst.

I'd gotten spoiled, really, getting to talk to S nearly every day since he left me four weeks ago. First he was in Kabul doing paperwork for days, giving him enough time to call me and email me. Then when he first returned to his fire base he was again doing the administrative things that drive him nuts but also give him the time to call me and email me. Those days are over, clearly, because I haven't talked to him for several days.

When the worry comes, it wells up from my belly, fills my chest and my face and makes the back of my skull tingle. It is the same sensation as when you feel you've done something horribly wrong that can never be corrected.

Not hearing from S for days wouldn't be a problem except that there has been a marked increase in violence these past few days too, with several coalition soldiers killed and a number of others injured. This morning, when again he hadn't called, I checked icasualties.org to see if there had been anyone hurt or killed in Afghanistan and that's when I found them: a story about a soldier killed near the Pakistan border and another story about several soldiers injured, again near the Pakistan border. Neither listed names (of course), and because these stories of violence were about Afghanistan, the War Our Nation Forgot, they might as well have been about violence on Mars. Place names mean little when they aren't on any maps.

In the news release of the soldier who was killed, "near Lwara," they mentioned FOB Salerno and nothing more. I googled "Lwara" first and found some mention of the Pakistan Border, then I googled FOB Salerno and found a blurb about it on globalsecurity.org where they said it was in Khowst Province, a province I knew was south of where S is stationed.  I felt that selfish relief of knowing it wasn't S, and then this arching sadness for the wife or girlfriend or mother or daughter who was not as lucky as me, who would get a rap on the door in the next few days and have her heart torn out of her right there at the threshold of her home. I did the same sort of search of the places where soldiers were injured, and I was assured, again, that they weren't in S's province, though they were no farther away from him than I am from Springfield. I know he is too busy to call, but perhaps he is still safe. That's good enough these days.

I think of them as forgotten places in our forgotten war, these FOBs and towns and border areas nestled in unnamed provinces and all in the "southeast" or "northeast" and nearly all "along the Pakistan Border." There is no geography of these forgotten places. When I read about another explosion of death, injury, I turn to the one map I've found on the web that has all of the provinces and a number of cities marked and I search for the stripped-down names mentioned in the news release. Rarely do I find them. They are too remote or the map is too old, or the spellings are wrong because the translations are as misguided as our actions in our twin wars. The descriptions "southeast Afghanistan," "northeast Afghanistan," further complicate matters. I search the bottom of the country, the south, and find nothing, just as when I search the top of the country, the north and find nothing. These descriptions imply quadrants of a country evenly divided up on a map. Instead, they represent a tight spiral shooting out from Kabul in a 200 or so mile radius. Why? Because there are whole provinces where we have no presence at all, coalition forces or ANA. They are not even forgotten since they were never remembered to begin with.

The DoD press releases reflect the forgotten nature of the war, for  "southeast Afghanistan" is just a couple of hundred miles vaguely south, vaguely east from Kabul, just as "northeast Afghanistan" is an equal distance vaguely north. The wars are vague, the orders are vague. What we are doing is vague and in Afghanistan at least, the places are vague too. We're left in this fog and it's maddening.

Some days I follow this trajectory of worry. It arches to a crescendo then comes back down again, spiking up and down like heartbeat readings on a monitor screen and nearly as fast. My heart follows these waves of worry, cresting until I've identified the forgotten place or I've heard from him, then retreating again, only to rise instantly with the next batch of worrisome news. This afternoon after my google searches, after I was certain Lwara was where it was, I went online and used a coupon my mother had given me and bought S new underwear at the Gap. I know he'll need them when he gets home, and for now at least, I'm certain he will come home.

Tonight I went to see Operation:Dreamland with my friends Maria and Ken. I'll write about it the morning and how since my post of several days ago, A Milestone to Regret, another sixteen American soldiers have died in Iraq. Before the families of these dead soldiers were given their heartbreaking news, they had suffered through the same worry that I felt this morning, the same unknowing, for days and sometimes weeks. Instead of getting to come down from that crest, they have been held up there indefinitely, their lives forced into the anti-flux of grief.