Kate Ingold: Afghanistan

The Kite Runner and Other Sagas

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 23:32:57 GMT

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!

Saturday morning

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 16:58:27 GMT

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?

Phone call from S

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 16:00:34 GMT

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.

The Stephanie Nightmare

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 05:01:23 GMT

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.

99 Days

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 05:00:59 GMT

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.

That Question

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:13:30 GMT

"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.

Day for Night

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 20:32:12 GMT

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.

Flush with Rumor

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:31:10 GMT

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.

The View from Inside

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:26:25 GMT

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.

The Falluja Nightmare and Our Unknown Numbers

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 04:10:45 GMT

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?

Forgotten Places in a Forgotten War

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 06:15:54 GMT

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.

What a difference a rank makes

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:54:44 GMT

Yesterday on Altercation, Major Bob posted a letter about the tradition and glories of the salute and how much mutual respect commissioned officers and NCOs have for each other. Someone sent Major Bob's letter to some guy in Afghanistan and he wrote a response. I have no idea who this "Sergeant Joe" is, but he's a damn fine writer!

You can read Sergeant Joe's response by scrolling down to his letter here.

You can read Major Bob's piece by scrolling down to his letter here.

What a difference a rank makes...

And now that number is 2006

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:52:26 GMT

Because, Mr. President, there has to be a better way to bring our troops home.

Watch the ad here.

Then give to Operation Truth what you can spare to get this ad on the air.

Las Lloronas, The Crying Women

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 02:00:22 GMT

Coyolxauhqui, daughter of Coatlicue, as a broken woman at the base of Templo Mayor.

Las Lloronas/The Crying Women

As she cried,
she drowned her children,
wrung them breath-
dry in the river
after he left.

He left with cudgels, rifles, and short knives,
perhaps with another woman's
                                                wet
on his lips, she tells me.

I know about crying.
I tell her my words left
under river stones and broken-
down bridges failed
to come up that day.
I found only an inadequate list:
weep, wail, bawl, keen,
a collection of girl-words
soaked in absurdity.

Yes, I killed them, she tells me,
like a man, then I wept
like a woman.

We part at the end of the river
where the water turns
                                  brackish.

Her laments follow me
home, entangle in my damp
hair, sway me to sleep.

I wake when the night
                                   dawns
with a splatter of stars across the ink-blood sky.
Outside, the mourning
                                   doves speak little cries,
feed the young and feather-
cover their eyes. Tear-
stripped naked, I swim
in the river next to her, run
my fingers in the hair
of her first-born son
as he descends.

c Kate Ingold, November 2004, New Orleans

S and I spent the summer of 2003 in Oaxaca City, a colonial town of 75% indigenous population in the thick of the largest state in Mexico, the state Cortes described to the Spanish crown by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on a table. To walk through the mountains of Oaxaca, he said, was to walk through that crumpled parchment.

That summer I studied Spanish and S worked at an archaeological site on the road to Mitla about 35 miles outside of the city. The site was an ordinary household in a Zapotec suburb of 1,000 years ago, a collection of patios surrounded by rectangular structures each with the family's dead entombed beneath the patio and in front of an altar. Many of the men S worked with were from a nearby Zapotec village, Maquilxochitl, which means "Five Flower" in Nahuatl. Some day in the future, after he's done with this war, S will do his doctoral research in Maquilxochitl, where families live in the same patio-structure compounds their relatives did those years ago and where the tlyudas are made on adobe stoves fired by craggled mesquite.

I was flooded with the stories of the women I met there, particularly the women of Maquilxochitl who fed us stewed squash with onions, chile, and Oaxacan string cheese, and those miraculous tlyudas made from corn they'd ground themselves on volcanic metates. So many of the stories were about goodbyes. Women had said goodbye to their children years ago before the children went north to cross the border, and some hadn't seen them since. Others had said goodbye to their chidren before they had left to cross the border themselves, returning years later when their children were no longer children. One woman had four daughters and only one was still in Oaxaca. The other daughters were scattered from San Jose, California down to Baja and Mexico City, where one daughter worked in a plastics factory. This woman had crossed the border herself several times, outwitted coyotes and was beaten by one, but ended up coming back to Oaxaca for good and married one of S's good friends, Procopio. Her cousin crossed fifteen years ago and she never heard from him again. He was presumed to be dead.

How many have died in the river of two names, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, or in the dusty, waterless desert? Can you imagine how many?

I had been reading about Mexico for a few years before that summer we spent in Oaxaca, including books about Mexico's rich religious and cultural heritage. The country is crawling with stories. legends, myths. When I got home, I started a series of poems about women facing what we face at this beginning of the third millennium, and how these stories relate to the histories of our anscestors and my own life. Las Lloronas is one of these poems.

I wrote this poem the day after S was "called up," one week and two days before Thanksgiving last year. They really did call. Early, before 7. We were both still in bed in our leaky New Orleans apartment because it was a Tuesday and neither of us had class. They called on the cell phone we shared and they told him he was to report to his base in Indiana the following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving. We were supposed to leave that day for New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with S's family, but suddenly everything was uncertain, unknown. S was in his final semester of classes in his PhD program. In just a few months he was to take his comprehensive exams then his orals, and then the following autumn (right now in fact) we were to go back to Oaxaca where S was to begin a dig at the temples ringing the small chapel on top of Cerro Danush, the symmetrical mountain that sits prominently inside the village of Maquilxochitl, a mountain that the entire village ascends on May 3rd to celebrate the Festival of the Cross. Now we weren't even sure he'd be able to finish his semester. I was a full-time instructor at University of New Orleans and I knew I had to make some decisions too. Should I stay in New Orleans or go back to Chicago to be near my mother? This all happened in an instant, and as a stark reminder that nothing is constant, all is change, our lives were changed instantly.

Yes, you'd think that there would have been a little more consideration for national guard soldiers, an understanding that they would have to "tie up loose ends" and make arrangements at work, school, home. But no. There was none of that until S and the other four men who were called (the unit had been split up and splintered the previous August, with some of the group sent to Afghanistan and others ordered to stay home to help train new members) complained so bitterly they were given a reprieve. But this happened a few days later, just before we were to leave for New Jersey, and just after we called the airline to see if we could change our tickets (the answer was no, by the way). It was the first of several mid-play changes, some good, some not, that would define our next several months and demonstrate how absolutely incompetent and confused the military brass were.

After that call I yelled at S, told him he clearly didn't love me since he had put our relationship and our future in jeopardy for the army (why he was still in is for another day). I cried and yelled, then cried again. He said that of course he loved me and that he regretted this as much as I did. I had to get away from him. I was too angry, too upset. I went into our roommate Rebecca's room. She was awake and had her coffee, which was curious. Usually she woke much later, but she was studying for her comps too and at the side of her bed was a mountain of books she was studying from. Her days were beginning early and ending late as she filled out note cards and typed out synopses of anthropology and archaeology texts. I went into her room and she took me in her arms and said "What's wrong, honey?" and I told her and she cried with me.

That day S and I talked a lot. We talked about what would happen. We talked about how much we loved each other and how surprised S was because he was certain, dead certain, that Kerry would win and he wouldn't get called up. He apologized and apologized again, and then I forgave him.

The call had come after weeks of disappointment. The three of us were still in mourning over Kerry's loss, still stunned and stressed and dreading another four years with Bush in office. Election night we had sat together in the living room batting away brown june bugs and the occasional flying cockroach that had moved in through the open windows, and watched the results come in. When it started to look bad, Rebecca and I ran around the house and found things that represented the contested states: a Pretenders disc for Ohio; a chunk of cheese for Wisconsin; a book of poems by Florida poet David Kirby. Rebecca had spent eight years in West Africa working with Doctors Without Borders, so she gathered up her super-fine African juju sculptures like the two figures with nails and shanks sticking out of their bodies, and I gathered my Zuni fetishes (buffalo, toad, bear, Corn Mother). We placed it all on the table in the living room then rang the booty with La Virgen candles, curios, small bowls of our just-finished dinner, and several shots of tequila. Rebecca got sage out of the refrigerator and burned it, blew the smoke across the table and at the windows, and we both begged the spirits to help John Kerry win, to help all of us escape the Bush-born madness. As the night wore on and things got even more dire, we knocked on the door of our neighbor George, a voodoo practitioner who had helped Rebecca rid the apartment of evil spirits when she'd first moved in two years before. George wasn't home, which we should have taken as an omen, I guess. When we knew it was over, Rebecca went to her room and we crawled into our bed for a sleep deep enough, we'd hoped, to erase the night and start us over again.

Well, obviously it didn't work. S knew it wouldn't, but then he's much more practical than me. It was that morning after when I started to worry. I knew it would take more good juju than we had in our leaky apartment to prevent S from being called up. Three weeks later I was proven right.

The story of the La Llorona, the Crying Woman, comes from Mexico and it varies from the scorned harlot who kills her children out of revenge, to a scorned woman who kills her children to protect them from poverty, to a woman whose children are murdered by their father, to a woman who has a vision of her children being wisked away by floodwaters, only to wake up and find her nightmare had come true. In every version La Llorona dies, usually from her own hand, on the banks of the river that also took her children. For her crime she is condemned to die and to walk the banks as a ghost. In most versions of the story she feels regret and remorse for her rashness, and cries in longing for the children she will never see again. In the version of the story told around fires and at bedside by malicious babysitters, she roams the banks looking for children to snatch and take as her own.

When S was called up, I became a crying woman myself. The original version of the poem had allusions to the fact that we hadn't gotten pregnant yet (and that I therefore had no children to drown), but the wise ladies in my poetry workshop urged me to take that stuff out, and as usual they were right. But when I let loose the river inside of me and mourned for the forced separation that was to come, I felt an affecton for las lloronas who had come before me, and the thousands who are struggling with difficult goodbyes right now.

(I wonder, even, if Cindy Sheehan feels like la llorona too. She is trying to 'right' the wrong of her son's death, a death she feels all of us, including herself, are responsible for because we allowed Bush to be elected. She is wailing for her dead son on the banks of concrete rivers across the country.)

The photograph above is of Coyolxauhqui, the daughter and murderer of Coatlicue. She is part of the web of legends and myths that La Llorona is a part of. In this picture of the stone at the base of Templo Mayor in Mexico City, she is a broken woman, beheaded and shattered to pieces, the work of her just-born brother. Wikipedia has decent versions of the stories of Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and La llorona.

I decided to post this poem and this story today after reading two excellent posts yesterday about Lashaun Harris, a severely mentally ill woman who drowned her children and who faces execution for her crime. Dr. Omed's wife Elsbeth has a powerful personal essay about living with a manic-depressive, knowing a man who'd "sacrificed his arms to a train," and the possibility for mercy. And Phila at Bouphonia talks about Harris and the question of hearing voices. Of course Lashaun is a version of la llorona and Coyolxauhqui (she is certainly a broken woman), and sadly, her fate may be the same as the women of those legends. She may not die by her own hand, but rather by the groping hands of the state.

S the Soldier, Still a Three-Dimensional Man

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:52:37 GMT

Here is S, a Soldier, seated behind a big gun. He's got a scruffy beard because the Special Forces don't demand a clean-shave; in fact, they prefer a "Talibeard" as a mercenary we know calls it. S sent this picture to me while I was in Houston volunteering at the Astrodome after Katrina. The thought of putting up a picture of a giant instrument of death was too much for me after seeing so much death live on CNN during those grainy days after the city flooded. But now here it is.

Yes, S is a Soldier, and I capitalize that on purpose. For a Soldier -- honorable, strong, patriotic -- is something to be admired and worshipped. Their Sacrifice is without end. They are valiantly defending Our Rights abroad, keeping Our Country safe from terror and oppression. They are willing to make the Ultimate Sacrifice so that we may live in Freedom here at home.

But is that all he is? To some, yes. In fact, to many. Soldiers are abstract notions that fulfill dark or light fantasies of what "Soldier" means to people who don't know any. They are inhuman things, not red-blooded, three-dimensional human beings, human beings who happen to be soldiers.

S is a man. He is a husband and a lover, an intellectual, a lacrosse player, a former chemist and a current archaeologist, a kickboxing champion, a fabulous cook and baker, a fair athlete who believes in playing for the game's sake, not just winning, a backyard mechanic (remember that water pump we replaced in Baja?) and an amateur plumber. He is a son and nephew and someday he'll be a father. He is a generous friend who will do whatever needs to be done, whenever you need it. If you're sick, he'll make soup. If you need to move, he'll help you pack. He is an expert, soon-to-be published writer and a teacher. He's even lectured in Spanish. He is loyal and he can fix anything, whether it be a mechanical problem around the house or a fracture inside my delicate heart. He is not afraid of a challenge, which is why he is a jump master with dozens of jumps behind him though as a kid he was afraid of heights. He is a wit and a serious debater. He knows how to be gracious to those he disagrees with, though if you challenge him to a fight, he'll give it everything he's got, which is a lot. He is tenacious. Tough. And he is the kindest man I've ever known.

S is all this. And he happens to be a soldier too.

Why was I so upset that the demise of Daniel's blog became a cause celebre on the internet yesterday? Because while I don't know Daniel nearly as well as I know S, he is still more than an abstract noun to me. He is an awesome writer and a fiance to Holly. He is a three-dimensional man who happens to be a soldier, and reluctantly these days.

I know it was all well-intentioned. And I know that it will help Daniel get a book deal, if he wants one. I know too that the internet is like a wild animal that becomes fixated on one thing until the next shiny object distracts the attention away once again. Sometimes that attention is good. Sometimes it's malicious. But always it abstracts and dehumanizes. It can create paper cut-outs where people once were, even when that was not the intention.

S is S because it's too dangerous for him to be fully identified on my blog. We have different last names, so though I'm open about who I am, he is still protected. I share his stories when he says I can. This is the first picture of him in uniform that he was comfortable with me posting, so here it is. S the Soldier with a scruffy "Talibeard," seated behind a big gun.

Why Astrology Works Better Than Therapy

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 04:38:42 GMT

Tonight I sit on my couch with a half-flamed fire in the fireplace, alone. I've just finished a thrown-together dinner -- simple sauteed pork chop, leftover black beans, sauteed white onions with tomatoes -- made from a handful of groceries I picked up just an hour ago at the Whole Foods on Ashland Avenue. I spent the day with my mom. Lunch at Flo, a little shopping at the shoe store next door, a trip up Milwaukee Avenue to Max Gerber to check out affordable kitchen sinks. Afterwards we went back to her place and made a couple of decaf cappuccinos before heading out to the Boyd Gallery on Wells for the opening of their newest show, a collection of square canvases by an Italian abstract painter. Painted on the canvases were different shades of the same color, like white and white and white or black and black and black or blue and blue and blue. All of the colors were in squares or rectangles and were differentiated by texture, not just tone, like rough and smooth and some with brush strokes and some with none. At the gallery I talked to several people about how much better free internet phoning is than any phoning that's not free and how hard it is to paint black oil enamel over kitchen cabinets and how, miraculously, one writer's house across the road from Delgado Community College got only an inch or two of water and no real damage at all. I don't know this writer. My writer friend whose house is close to Delgado got several feet of water, I found out today, which meant the loss of over 350 books. It was like losing 350 family photographs because each book had a story and a place and a time it was associated with, though most (not all) can be replaced, unlike photographs. He and his wife are in Santa Fe because they still can't live in their water-logged house, their house without those 350 books.

My mom and I were to meet her boyfriend Howard at the gallery then go to dinner. But when he got there, after I'd talked with those several people for an hour, maybe more, and when we left the gallery and were walking toward the car, I had this overwhelming desire to leave and get home to be alone. The last thing on earth I wanted to do, suddenly, was go out to dinner with the two of them.

So now here I am: alone on the couch with my half-flamed fire and my thrown-together dinner cooked from a handful of groceries I picked up at the Whole Foods on Ashland. It's one of the saddest ironies that depression brought upon by loneliness makes you want to be alone.

It's not that I didn't see my abrupt departure coming. All day I was grumpy. I was quick to tear up. Over lunch, I found myself weepy over our uncertain financial future, over the house, and mostly over the fact that I feel like my writing is going nowhere and even the blog I find no purpose in at all most days.

I am, again, completely irrational, and I know it. That should make me feel better, in theory, but instead it makes me feel worse. I ought to be able to do something about it if I can see it for what it is. This irrationality is cyclical, but it's not connected to the cycles of the moon or of the waves or even of the sun. It's not even connected to when I speak to S (though it most certainly is connected to the fact that he's in Afghanistan and not here next to me in front of this half-flamed fire). I talked to him this morning via Skype for fifteen minutes, maybe more, about the beastiality some of his ANA troops participated in this past week (and no, I'm not joking), about how he blinked and blinked while boxing a guy on base (it's been a few years since he last sparred), and how today was "Fuck Off Friday," the Afghan equivalent of our Sunday, a day of rest and of doing-whatever-you-damn-well-please. I talked to him this morning and still I spent the day feeling out of control and irrational. It's the cycles within my heart that move from deep in the crater and out again, over and over without end.

The insecurity over my writing came up when my mother told me she showed the post I wrote about nanotechnology and Carmen and green building and passion to Howard and how Howard had forwarded it to Chuck. Suddenly I felt a twinge of panic. Did I write something offensive? What the hell is wrong with me writing about people I know and posting it to a public blog? Even conversations? And, worse, why did I feel so betrayed when she told me this?

I've had a hard time being around my mom and Howard these past few weeks and I've tried to figure out why. I've wondered if I'm jealous or if I miss having my mother to myself. I've wondered if it is that when I'm with them, a couple, and without S, I'm therefore not a couple. I've wondered if it is that I'm sick of being around my mom's friends because I have no friends of my own here in Chicago after being gone so long, except for a couple who I hardly ever see and none of them are writers. In New Orleans I had friends, a lot of friends, and I had S. I had the poetry group and I had our roommate Rebecca, and I had S. Now New Orleans is a flooded wreck of what it was. The poetry group is scattered and I haven't even talked to any of them in weeks, and Rebecca is in Nigeria, and I haven't talked to her in weeks either. And, of course, S is still in Afghanistan, still away from me, and I know I feel his absence more acutely now because we spent those two weeks together and they were such good weeks. We're still not pregnant and we're still not parents. It's only the last two days that I haven't felt completely exhausted.

On my drive to my mom's place this afternoon I passed two trees on Lake Shore Drive that looked to have been dipped in red candy, the kind candied apples are dipped in. Just the leaves at the tops of the trees were red while the rest were still green. I didn't think there would be much fall color this year because our summer was so dry and so hot, but I was wrong. The city is goldenrod and ochre now with hints of chartreuse and crimson, though that is most rare. So many of the old trees have died the past decade -- oaks, elms, maples, hickories -- from foreign bugs and diseases, and they've been replaced with these thin-trunked Kentucky Coffees and others similar that have groups of petite, diamond-shaped leaves rather than the hand-sized, star-shaped leaves of the maples or the Dadaesque leaves of the elms. These new trees turn yellow and nothing else.

It is, I know, impossible to lessen this loneliness through activity because though I miss my friends and even that crawling, stinky city, I really only miss S. It's his absence that I feel most, and it's his absence that I can do absolutely nothing about. Which is why this loneliness is so irrational.

I'm writing every day. I'm applying for work. I'm getting the house together. I'm not exercising or meditating or doing yoga or any of the other things I know I should, but I am reading and I'm reading good books. I'm eating right and I'm trying to dress appropriately so I can avoid getting that deep chill I had last spring when I first came back from New Orleans, when I felt cold even if the temperature outside was in the upper 60s. I'm leading a workshop for NWA at a library in Uptown (it's all mine starting next week) and I'm writing, every day, even if I think it's all a bunch of crap. None of it seems to matter.

By the sliding glass doors at the Whole Foods on Ashland was a pink paper flyer: "Why Astrology Works Better Than Therapy." I'm not the only lonely heart in town, I guess. But tonight in front of this half-flamed fire that doesn't matter either.

Our Waterlogged Carousel, Spinning into Oblivion

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:03:00 GMT

How about war with Syria? Anyone? Anyone?

It seems we're already "engaged" on the Iraq/Syrian border:

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials.

[...]

Some other current and former officials suggest that there already have been initial intelligence gathering operations by small clandestine Special Operations units inside Syria. Several senior administration officials said such special operations had not yet been conducted, although they did not dispute the notion that they were under consideration.

Whether they have already occurred or are still being planned, the goal of such operations is limited to singling out insurgents passing through Syria and do not appear to amount to an organized effort to punish or topple the Syrian government.

And you thought I was joking.

I know, I know. You're saying to yourself that we already have a shortage of troops in the overstretched military, that we're already spending billions that we don't have (and that we're borrowing from China) to sustain our ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the corporate pillaging in the Gulf Coast, and you're wondering how we can afford, in the fullest sense of that word, yet another war. And I say to you, have faith! Faith in our president and his leadership!! With God telling him what to do he will not lead us astray.

Is it just me or is it becoming increasingly difficult to write about politics? I feel like I write the same argument over and over again in response to the same outrageous actions by the administration, and nothing ever changes. It's as if we are on a carousel in the middle of the drowned Ninth Ward, fighting the waters slapping all around us just as the mad carnival operator operates the machine with a remote control high up in his Blackhawk enjoying every minute of our suffering. I read a comment today on another blog about how evil homosexuality is but how it's okay if the army turns their blind eyes from gay soldiers who have been activated for Iraq, even if those soldiers have been open about their homosexuality and therefore have violated the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Several commenters even said that gay soldiers fighting in a war zone are "patriotic" but that when they get back from their war service they should be "prosecuted" and given a dishonorable discharge because "their lifestyle is evil." There are still neanderthals out there that think this way.

And then there was the comment on Op Truth from a soldier who participated in Bush's Q&A the other day that was "outed" by the AP as being staged. The soldier said that he and the others weren't prodded at all, that they are firm supporters of the war in Iraq, and that they are "preserving YOUR freedom of speech." I have no doubt that this soldier, and probably the other nine who were handpicked by the military to talk to the president, is behind the war. And I have no doubt, too, that the vast majority of soldiers who are serving in Iraq are "for the war" when their superiors are standing next to them or behind the cameraman facing them, and that many remain supportive even when they get home and get the hell out of the military. This doesn't mean that tens of thousands of soldiers aren't against the war, but who can deny that many are for it? When they are trained to fight in wars and, especially the younger ones, are eager to 'test' their training in the field, it's not exactly a surprise. I also have no doubt that not a single soldier fighting in Iraq, not a single soldier who has died in Iraq or lost a limb in Iraq or lost his or her mind in Iraq, is or was "preserving" my freedom of speech.

The carousel spins and spins, waterlogged and rotten.

And speaking of the Ninth Ward and Lakeview and New Orleans East, apparently animal rescue workers are finding more dead than alive, except for the feral dogs roaming the streets and no doubt feasting on the corpses of their dead cousins and neighbors. I wonder how many of these wild dogs became wild the past month and a half and how many were already wild, members of the roving bands we'd encounter walking our dog down Carondelet and driving down Louisiana Avenue or even Napoleon. Sometimes the dogs still had their leashes attached. Many had remnants of collars, but many more had no leash, no collar. They were pure-bread dogs and mongrels, the females with fat nipples hanging down toward the ground, the males free to piss on every patch of "who" grass along the crackled sidewalks. They were sometimes intimidating, their free-spirit struts and power in numbers, and our dog Casey would breathe heavy until they passed or we made it home. The first pack of wild dogs we saw on our trip to New Orleans before deciding to move there, the same trip we heard from the real estate agent (who was, in theory, trying to sell us a house) that any house would "get flooded and get termites," and probably have to be shorred up, and the same trip where we saw then-mayor Marc Morial on our B+B room television set standing before a green-screened animated computer graphic of the city filling with water like a baby's bath tub under the spout, and telling us that the levees along the lake were certain to be breached and overflowed from even a category 4 hurricane. I remember S turned to me when we saw the dogs and said, "I feel like I'm in Mexico," and after Mayor Morial's half hour plea to get the hell out of the city if he tells you to, "We are definitely not buying a house down here."

One Saturday when we lived on Magazine Street near the "dog park" levee at the turn of the river, we encountered a yellow/brown dog hanging out at the gravel parking lot next to an abandoned, condemned shop. The dog was clearly abandoned too, and was making a home for himself in the upturned insides of the building that just a few days before had been torn apart by a drunk driving a pick-up (the driver had plowed into the building, scraping two cars parked there and barely missing ours, and then abandoned his car and fled. Since it was New Orleans, it took about two weeks for the truck to be removed and the wall to be patched up with plywood.) The dog wasn't quite feral yet when we first saw him. He accepted food and water from us and didn't growl. We called the humane society (the police didn't have a K-9 or animal control unit. At least that's what they said when I called.) and were told that it would take at least two weeks for someone to come for the dog because there were so many reports, always, of near-feral dogs and they were horribly understaffed. The man on the phone told me we had two options: feed the dog and hope for the best, that the dog could survive the two plus weeks it would take for a professional to collect him, or take the dog in. We couldn't do the latter -- our leaky apartment was already too small for my husband and I and our dog -- so we kept feeding the animal, but within a week he was gone, and I'm quite certain he wasn't picked up by SPCA. He just joined the others, leashed or not, to hunt for rats in the bushes and undergrowth of New Orleans, or take a spin on that waterlogged carousel.

So my cousin Bobby couldn't come up this weekend after all. He was offered a job he couldn't refuse. I'm completey excited for him and I don't mind waiting until S comes home to install our new kitchen. Bobby and his wife have started their own housebuilding business and they break ground on their first spec-house in just two weeks. They both have to keep their regular jobs -- with four kids between them they really have no choice -- and any extra income from overtime weekend jobs helps a lot. Oh well! I know "we can do that," and I don't much mind waiting. I've lived with this kitchen for six years, so what's a few more months?

This means that I can enjoy this beautiful fall day, though I'm not sure how I'll do that. S is stuck in Kabul for another couple of days, away from his cold-weather clothes and he's already sick. I'm sure the depression he's dealt with ever since landing back at Bagram doesn't help. He knows it's only a handful of months, but every day feels long and those months seem impossibly so. Hopefully he'll be able to call again today. For that reason I selfishly wish he could stay in Kabul, even if he was stuck for the next few months with the "mofrakies" he's dealing with there (or the "PX soldiers" as my cousin Bobby, a former Blackhawk pilot, calls them). It's so wonderful to hear his voice, even if it is crackled with static and delayed from its long travel up to space and back down again.

Violence Erupts

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 03:44:43 GMT

The earth opened up in Pakistan and 20,000 or more are dead. First we offered $100,000 in aid, then we were shamed into giving $50 million, a substantial sum though only one-third of the $148 million we gave in military aid this year. (There is always money for guns and bullets, only less for bottled water and medical supplies). Right now hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping without shelter in a mountainous place that nurtures chilly winds this time of year. Doctors Without Borders has sent teams and supplies and they need our help.

Across the border in Afghanistan, five suicide bombers have blown themselves up in two weeks, a chinook has crashed, and another US soldier has been killed along the eastern border. Iraq is, perennially, Iraq, where every day brings more despair, more tragedy. Most Americans are against that war, but does it matter? The violence continues, more and more people die, more families are torn apart by the deaths of those they love and our president continues to offer empty platitudes, desperate calls for patriotism. He is trying to convince himself, no doubt, just as he is trying to convince us. Doesn't he know we already know the truth?

In Guatemala, the clouds erupted in a flood of tears, leaving hundreds buried in rivers of mud. This time last year the story was drought, showing that April does not own the market on cruelty.

Many of our water-soaked neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi are still suffering on this Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples Day, including the United Houma Nation. Katrina and Rita left nearly 5,000 of their tribal members homeless and many others unable to inhabit their homes. Organizations like Veterans for Peace have been helping them, but not the Red Cross or FEMA, who has only worked with a handful of families so far. You can help them directly here.

On Democracy Now today, the United Houma Nation's Principal Chief, Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, talked about the troubles her tribe has faced these past five weeks and why Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer working for the Spanish crown who never set foot on the land that would become the US, should not be honored with a national holiday. "Let's face it," she said, "Columbus was a slave trader and an Indian killer...This shouldn't be a day of celebration, this should be a day of mourning."

And so it is.

The Uncertainty of It All

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 17:12:38 GMT

Last night I saw Copenhagen at the TimeLine Theatre on Wellington Avenue on the border of Lakeview in northern Lincoln Park. The play, by Mark Frayn, attempts to reconstruct a meeting between two physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr, the "father of atomic phsyics," was a mentor to Heisenberg, who authored the "Uncertainty Principle" which according to the notes (I'm no physicist, so please bear with me!), says that we can't know both the position of a particle and it's velocity simultaneously. Heisenberg stayed in Germany during the rise of Hitler and Nazism, working for the German government at the university in Leipzig, while Bohr was forced to flee from Denmark by the Germans because of his Jewish ancestry. In the course of a short visit between these two old friends, a conversation ensued that may have changed the course of World War II, though the details of the conversation are to this day unknown.

It is the question of this uncertainty, the uncertainty of what the two men talked about that afternoon, that is the crux of the play. Heisenberg stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazi regime, developing a nuclear reactor but no weapons. Bohr fled to the US in 1943 and ended up working at Los Alamos and ultimately on the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago this year, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. In the play, Bohr and his wife challenge Heisenberg (in the reconstructions of the visit and perhaps in the afterlife -- the opening scene has Margrethe, Bohr's wife, talking about how they are dead now and finally safe to tell all) and accuse him of trying to develop the bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg, who never developed the bomb and claimed to have stayed in Germany to maintain control over Germany's program as to ensure they never did develop nuclear weapons, challenged Bohr to defend his role in developing the bomb and unleashing it on the world. During that afternoon in 1941, Heisenberg supposedly asked Bohr what moral responsibility scientists had during times of war (basically if their loyalties should lie with humanity as a whole or with their country) and the question alone made Bohr think Heisenberg was trying to find out if the Allies were developing the atom bomb and admitting that the Germans were. In the end, Heisenberg was villified for working with the Germans and Bohr and the other Allied scientists were seen as heroes for developing and dropping the atomic bomb. The play challenges us to review this logic by showing both men as they question their own roles and the consequences of their actions. Heisenberg, who by living in Germany throughout the war saw the destructive power of conventional bombs, said he would never have developed the bomb because its victims "could have been my widowed mother...my wife, my son." The two wonder if there will one day be a quantitative physics, one that decides how many are too many and when horrors are justified.

During intermission, my mother and her friend and I talked about the state of uncertainty in our country right now, and our seemingly limitless tolerance for chaos. Her friend said that he thought the neocons, through privatization and wars of choice, are trying to "starve the beast" of government and make it completely ineffective and bankrupt, as Grover Norquist has proposed. I argued that though their rhetoric talks about this it isn't what they actually want, and that instead of dreaming of some sort of libertarian/anarchic hollow government, the neocons actually want our government to be a capitalist/conservative version of the Mexican PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled the country for nearly a century until Vincente Fox was elected in 2000. The PRI is still very much in control and are poised to take back the presidency next year. Unlike the dream of teeny tiny government, the PRI believe in gangster government, one that is about laundering money, filtering it from the people to the corporations and their elite directors. Our government is doing the same thing. We have the largest deficit in our nation's history, yet we have an atrocious lack of services and support. Our government is growing monetarily in ways few "conservatives" could have fathomed five years ago, and most of the money is going to private corporations, subcontractors, who do the jobs goverment used to do less efficiently and clearly at a higher cost. It is a brilliant money-laundering scheme: tax the people, putting a higher burden on the middle class and working poor, and spend that money on corporate contracts and handouts. Say that it is through privatization that a more "lean" government will be produced, and convince legions of "conservatives" that it will lead to "smaller" government while growing government spending exponentially. The money changes hands seamlessly from the people to the government to the corporation, therefore "cleaning" it no differently than Al Capone did in the 1930s or Salinas in the 1990s when he sold Mexico's resources for a handful of campaign contributions. My mom's friend said that this made no sense because it wasn't sustainable -- eventually the system would collapse and the elites would suffer too -- but I pointed out that it seemed it was sustainable, since Mexico, though it is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, goes on and on with its elites gaining more power and more money even as the average person continues to suffer.

If we are going through a "Mexicanization," then our future is even more bleak than we can imagine, seeing that Mexico is going through its own transformation, its "Colombiazacion" as the drug cartels take over law enforcement and other governmental positions. Imagine a future like Colombia's present. My only hope is that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to politics and economics too, and that because we're in the middle of this thing we can't know how fast we're going, so maybe we're not careening off the cliff as we seem to be but rather taking a slow enough sail we can turn ourselves around before it's too late. I'm becoming more of a cynic, but I have to have some sort of hope.

Yes, the uncertainty of it all. I talked to S yesterday morning and he's back in Kabul where he'll be for about ten days before heading back to his FOB near the Pakistan border. He told me that he went to take out $200 from his account and was told that he had to have a "permission slip" from an officer E-7 or higher. A permission slip to take out his own money that he's earned!!! It's so completely outrageous and it's new. Before he left for his two week R+R, no one needed "permission" to access their own bank accounts. Also new are soldiers wearing electronic monitoring anklets. He saw two on base yesterday. Apparently they are under house arrest at home, but that doesn't preclude them from being called up for duty in Afghanistan. What the hell is going on?!

We're both rather down these days and our conversation was pretty brief. "I'm feeling pretty bad," he told me, "so I'll have to call you tomorrow. I just want to go to sleep." The initial rebound was easier this time, but I think we're both feeling our loneliness more acutely because we had so much fun together. Two weeks out of an entire year is not enough. We're holding onto the certainty (false, perhaps) that he will be home by mid-February or maybe sooner if by some miracle Afghanistan settles down between now and then. He's ready to come home. And I'm ready to have him home again for good.

The Second Goodbye

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 22:10:13 GMT

I've been trying to get my mind back in order these past two days, still a little delirious from our two weeks together and the heavy days I've had since he left. It was so good to see him, to touch him. I hated saying goodbye to him again.

It turns out we were both apprehensive about seeing each other. I started to get nervous about it down in Houston, worrying that we would not know each other anymore, or worse that we would be irritated with one another after such a long absence. His flight was changed at the last minute so he ended up leaving Dallas later than he'd hoped. I was to pick him up near 11 p.m. instead of 8, and since it was a Friday night, there was crawling traffic around the airport made worse by late-night construction work. He'd told me I could get a pass and meet him at the gate, so I left the house early to get to the airport on time to get the pass. With the traffic, though, I missed that chance. I called him when his flight was supposed to land and left a harried message while my car idled near the exit for 294, still a mile or so away from the airport, then rolled down the windows and sighed. What the hell can you do.

I drifted to him waiting at the car pick-up area at Terminal 1, a dead-end traffic-wise. He put his bags in the back seat, sat down in the front. I burst into tears. We hugged and kissed and the light from the bug-juiced overheads streamed inside, surrounded him, made me cry more. He was in the car with me. Right there! It took a couple of minutes before I could drive us home, a couple of pets on his shoulders, his arms, his legs. A brush of my lips against his cheek. It was too much, finally seeing him, touching him. It had been more than seven months, and really two more before that when we'd said our first goodbye. I'd driven him to a buddy's house in the south suburbs, a mid-century ranch with a large American flag pinned to the garage door, a handful of smaller flags stuck in the frozen lawn around the walkway, and helped him load up the van for the drive to Indiana to catch a bus for Ft. Hood. It was a blinding-bright day, deeply cold. The sun's shadows were long and black, each bare hickory and oak cast across the salt-rimmed frontage roads as Brancusi sculptures. I hated that drive home.

When I drove away from S in Ft. Hood two months later it didn't feel as final as it had that day in Chicago. I wasn't driving home alone to an empty house but rather back to Austin to check in my car and fly away. (Perhaps it was that sense of false goodbye I wanted to preserve these past months, traveling as I have.) I have only a few solid memories of Kileen, Texas, those days were so blurred with worry and so intense. There were the crashed cars at the fort's entrances with LCD signs giving how many days since the last person was killed in a crash ("13 Days," "16 Days," then back to "0 Days"); the tanks and anti-aircraft guns sprinkled in front of dusty brown administration buildings and barracks, the 1st Calvary's and 4th Infantry's very own sculpture gardens; Hell on Wheels Avenue, Tank Destroyer Boulevard; the cardboard tents set up on tables in the PX advertising life insurance -- at a special Military price, of course! -- and the hollow-eyed men quietly eating pulled pork sandwiches and pepperoni pizza together, or alone; the tent-covered book sale outside the PX, where soldiers could buy, at a discount of course, romance novels, self-help books, and countless versions of the illustrated Bible; the internet cafe run by a middle-aged Vietnamese woman in a strip mall near tattoo parlors and pawn shops, and her stories of buying homes, renovating them, and selling them again; the screaming "We Support Our Troops!" banners hanging in the windows of competing car dealerships that sold brand new cars at high interest rates to young boys before they flew off to Kuwait and then to war; the check-in den at the mouth of the fort, not so different than a check-in den at a prison or jail, with every "visitor" required to show ID and car registration after taking a number and sitting and waiting, waiting to prove who they were to the tired bureaucrats behind the counter (I went in once and there was no one in line so I went straight to the counter. The man told me to take a number -- "we have a procedure" -- and to wait my turn, which was, surprise, next.); the "welcome home" messages outside the cav's staging area made out of green and red and blue and white plastic cups stuffed in chain-link fence pockets; the boy-young soldier with a prosthetic where his right forearm and hand used to be, shopping in the Target off the frontage road; and the mass of blackbirds howling at dusk in the squat tree across the road from my pasty room at the Super 8.

We drove home from the airport and it was a warm Chicago summer night, and when we got home he told me stories he'd stored for the past seven months, then I told him how I needed him to write me more while he's gone. We got it out, then made love and made love again, and filled ourselves with each other so much so that when I discovered yesterday that I'm not pregnant, again, I was more puzzled than sad. How could I not be when it was so intense, so true? (I already know the answer to that.) By our third day together we both said "It's as if I/you never left," and went on to just be together, again and again, day after day, as if there was no war and no hurricane and no political turmoil. We talked about our dog Casey and how silly and adorable he was. We went to silly movies and S baked three apple pies (he is the best baker I've ever known -- better crusts than my mom's or my grandmother's, which, honestly, were the best crusts ever baked, ever, before S started baking them). We both gained a few happy pounds, made every bite count as we filled up with that luscious goodness.

Saturday night we stayed up late getting his stuff packed. We stuffed four pairs of boxing gloves, thai leg kick pads, focus mitts, hand wraps, and a pair of five-ounce Harbingers into his green duffle, then topped it off with his shower sandals and a couple of mud brown towels. The rest of his gear he crammed into his sandy backpack, including one newly cleaned and pressed uniform, a little scruffy at the seams from river-stone washings and life in the harsh mountains. The next morning we rose early, stopped at the coffe shop to get a couple of lattes, drove to the airport and parked the car on White Sox, 3rd level, 3rd aisle, and I wondered out loud why the parking czars would have levels and aisles both numbered, not one with letters instead. He got to check in at the special "group" check-in, which on first glance seemed to be a shorter line but was in fact as long as the others. I was issued a special pass to go with him to the gate, then we went through security, and since S is a soldier he is also a potential terrorist, so they searched him and his gear, rubbed his hands to test for bomb-making residue, then confiscated his beard-trimming scissors. The TSA man felt bad, really, then threw the scissors in the trash. S told me that he was searched extensively on the way to Chicago too, and he said he resented being treated like a terrorist when he's fighting in this supposed "war on terror." "They treat us like kids," he said, "and fucking criminals."

We roamed the United terminal, reminiscing about all of the flights we missed in the late 90s when that airline was so greedy they booked flights they had no intention of flying, and when the customer service lines stretched the length of the terminal in either direction (and if you've been to O'Hare, you know just how lengthy that is) filled with irate customers trying to get home. We stood around and held hands and made small talk. It's impossible to have a real conversation when you know it is going to be interrupted sometime soon with that call, "All rows are now boarding." I walked away when he handed his ticket to the check-in woman. I knew he wouldn't look back -- it's not his way -- and I didn't want to see him walk away from me down the aluminum tube to his plane. I follwed the signs out of the airport and found my car and drove home, where I stayed holed up until last night. I cooked an omelette, watched foolish shows on television and pretended to read "Massacre of the Dreamers," a collection of essays by Ana Castillo. In reality, though, I flipped through the pages, my eyes glossed over, and glanced up at the TV which may as well have been showing snowy static. That night just disappeared.

I have finally emerged, quicker this second time. The first time I stayed in my house for three days straight, only tumbling out to walk our sickly dog. I cleared our cabinets of canned goods that week and watched Sex and the City, the entire series, straight through. I feel like I've come a long way since then, seeing that my time-of-distraction was only a little more than 24 hours after this latest goodbye.

I know we're at the shorter end of this mess now. We don't think he'll be gone longer than five more months, so the worst is behind us. But I still miss him. I still worry. I can't wait to see him again and know, finally, that there will not be a third goodbye. Some, like my friends Daniel and Zach, have no idea when their last goodbyes will be. The army will not let them go. They've served tour after tour, their contracts long ago expired, and their families ache for them just as I ache for S. It's a travesty.

Here are S and Casey standing below a Live Oak at Audubon Park, New Orleans last December. The picture at the top of the post is from Ireland soon after we married six years ago.

The slow trickle of the truth

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 23:28:14 GMT

So here it is, almost exactly one month after Katrina roared into New Orleans, and the police chief has quit, and the rumors of violence that fueled so much of the racist-tinged discussions during those darker days have been proven false:

That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

The AP is covering the story today, but they are still perpetuating the myth that the National Guard soldier shot in the Dome was shot during a fight for his gun, when actually the attacker was not going for his gun at all, and the soldier shot himself in the leg during a moment of chaos.

Why do these corrections matter? Because still there is a stigma, an expectation, of crime and violence from the thousands and thousands of New Orleans evacuees who are poor and black. When I was in Houston there was talk of the "sky-rocketing" crime since the evacuees came into town, and rumors of looting when New Orleanians were seen walking out of Target with shopping bags. The speakers may not have said "black evacuees" but it was understood that was who they were talking about.

And shock and surprise, FEMA continues to bungle up their efforts, now just west of New Orleans in Beaumont, Texas:

County Judge Carl Griffith said today he has become so frustrated with the federal relief effort that he has instructed all local officials to use police force if they have to to take supplies from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"If you have enough policemen to take it from them, take it," Griffith said.

If they "steal" from FEMA will they be looters? Or heroes? Perhaps it will depend on their skin color.

S and I are enjoying our last few days together before he flies to Dallas this Sunday and then to wherever (the list of stops will be long, that's certain), and then finally back to Afghanistan. Our "tasting" dinner at Alinea was spectacular, but it was also breathtakingly expensive. Too much to even admit to spending on one meal. It must be the most expensive restaurant in this city, and probably one of the most expensive in the entire country. Oh well!! Too expensive for us is clearly not too expensive for many, many others. Two couples seated near us fly in from Philly once a month just to eat there. All of the tables were full. The couple sitting right next to us were celebrating their sixth anniversary too, but they were smart enough to have a simple glass of wine each and not indulge in the wine tasting option, a steady trail of fifth-filled glasses to go with each of the forteen courses (and we chose the "middle" tasting menu -- the largest has twenty-eight courses and was a "serious commitment" according to our waiter). We were in food- and drink-induced funks yesterday and literally didn't leave the house. We started moving about in the afternoon and cooked dinner, curled up again, and watched the first half of Scorsese's documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.

Today we've spent hours running errands to prepare for S's trip back, and fuming at the radio as we heard the maddening testimony of Mr. Brown who has decided, suprisingly of course, that the failures in New Orleans were the fault of everyone involved except him. According to Raw Story (via Salon), he's been hired by FEMA as a consultant, which makes sense in Bush World and absolutely no sense here in reality. It's just so maddening!

And in Iraq? We've killed the number two guy, again (doesn't the story sound familiar?), and still more soldiers are being killed, more Iraqis forced to live under constant threat of death (and forced to see their friends and neighbors killed). As for this, I hope it's not true:

In Karrada this summer, Mohammed and the neighborhood watched as American soldiers on patrol grew irritated at an Iraqi who had left his car in the street to run inside a store on an errand, blocking their armored convoy.

The Americans took one of the empty plastic water bottles they use to relieve themselves when on patrol, Mohammed said. When the Iraqi driver ran out to move his car, an annoyed American plunked him with the newly filled bottle and rolled on, Mohammed said.

But it wouldn't be surprising if it were true. This is what can happen when limits are pressed, when there is no end in sight to deployments let alone the war. Who knows what Bush's goals actually are for Iraq, how those goals will be achieved or when. He's not offering squat and neither is anyone else with even a smear of power. S had an excellent idea about it today, though. He says we should build democracy at the local level first, then let the government grow upwards from those local elected governments. As each locality was secured and governed, our troops could leave, eventually leaving the country all together. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) S is a peon (self-described) and no one gives a damn what he thinks. Still, it was nice to hear an actual idea today, nicer still that it was such a good idea.

If you weren't able to go to the massive peace march on Saturday in DC, check out Matt's reporting. He's got pictures. Cool pictures. Rock on, Matt.

So we wear long pants

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:58:10 GMT

I took this photo of the Stables Restaurant in Houston a couple of weeks ago when I was down there with Rebecca volunteeering at Reliant Park. The sign said "So we wear long pants," a complete puzzle to me like the billboard we passed earlier that day asking Houstonians to report "Smoking Vehicles." I asked Rebecca if it got so hot there cars would spontaneously combust. She laughed and told me that, no, it didn't get that hot, and that "smoking car" was what the locals called cars that let loose nasty exhaust from their tailpipes. The pant leg thing was about cowboys, Rebecca thought, because they don't wear shorts. They're so tough they gotta wear pants!

I called Rebecca today and talked to her dad who said they were headed north to a cousin's ranch to ride out Rita. Rebecca wasn't home, so I didn't get to find out what's happened to Steve and Johnie and Larry, if they were also evacuating for a second time in less than a month. I'm not as worried about Houston, perhaps naively, because they have so many more resources and stronger infrastructure than New Orleans. I expect they'll be able to get residents out or at least to proper shelter. All new construction since the late 80s (early 90s? I don't remember) have been required to withstand strong hurricane winds. And, of course, we should expect FEMA to finally act like a federal agency with limitless resources now that they've been shamed, rightly, by their criminally negligent behavior after Katrina. We can't expect anything more from Bush, naturally, and that's why he is still busy resting up from his hard work spreading chaos and disaster around the world instead of actually paying attention to what's going on in our country.

The numbers keep getting grimmer in Iraq. Afghanistan is on the national radar for a moment, with the recent election and Karzai's call to have the ANA in charge of all major military operations. S has talked about how already the Ministry of Defense is in charge of ANA operations (and the American ETT soldiers accompanying them), which has been a disaster because most of the ANA officers bought their status with bribes and have little or no actual military leadership experience. This is made worse because many of the American officers are only slightly more competent and are nearly always disconnected from the reality on the ground. The ANA colonels and generals tell their American counterparts how competent and brave they are over tea (they are known for braggadoccio), and the Americans don't bother to check it out to see if what they're saying is true, leading to ANA/ETT missions without maps, plans, or logistical support, clearly a recipe for disaster. The Afghans' incompetence (along with the incompetence of many of the American officers) has led to the deaths of Afghan soldiers and the endangerment of the American ETT soldiers who work with them.

Soon (only months from now! yea!), S will be able to write about all of this and in particular the egregious incompetence of much of the national guard leadership in Afghanistan. The national guard has been in charge of the last three rotations of ETTs, in theory one of the two most important jobs (along with finding al Qaeda members) in Afghanistan. If we are ever to leave Afghanistan, they have to have a competent, cohesive national army, and that is what the ETTs are in charge of creating. Right now the ETTs are still considered an afterthought, just as the plan-less missions some of them are being sent off on are dismissed by the higher-ups too. At this very moment, one of S's friends, an officer he worked with the first six months he was over there, is trying to find his way through an unexplored province with no map, no plan, and no logistical support, with only one other American and a platoon of Afghan soldiers with him. The American colonels said the Afghans were in charge, and didn't bother to look over the ANA's order. If they had, they'd have discovered it was a one-line mission followed by a blank piece of paper, giving the men nothing to go on but their own intelligence. More evidence of that great support we're giving our troops.

It's wonderful to talk about this somewhat in the abstract, only possible because S is right here next to me on the couch, working on his own iBook. We're having so much fun together it's hard to articulate the pure joy I'm feeling these days. I'm so happy he's home, even if it is only for a couple of short weeks. I'm so lucky!

Odyssey Redux: The Long Trip Home

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:53:17 GMT

I forgot to include this little nugget in my post yesterday, so here it is. It took S over 60 hours to get home from Afghanistan. The military sent him on a C-130 to Kuwait, where he and the other soldiers going on leave got to wait for almost 24 hours until they were wisked away on their private air carrier (ATA -- "on ATA you're on vacation!") to Budapest, Hungary. From Budapest they were flown to Shannon, Ireland. It was a packed flight, every seat taken up by an American soldier, so the duty free shops, restaurants and pubs were no doubt extatic to have so many shoppers deplane for no other apparent reason other than to spend money. From there they were flown to New Foundland, Canada, where they got to get off the plane again to a completely empty airport where S was told he couldn't drink the water (who knew?). Finally, then, they were flown to the United States, to the beautiful Dallas airport, which, in my experience, is one of the worst airports in the country, significantly less fun than Austin's where if you're lucky you can catch a local act playing near the bar in the center of American's terminal. In Dallas S got to find his own flight home to Chicago.

For every leg of the trip, more money to the gas companies, to the airline, and to the airports (duty free shopping!). What other reasons could there be for such a long, zig zag trip? A trip so different than the one S's dad took from Vietnam yeras ago? From Afghanistan to Kuwait to Budapest to Shannon to New Foundland to Dallas, no one got on and all of the passengers were soldiers going home on leave.

Ah, the beauty of privatization. What were the benefits again?

My husband went to war and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:37:15 GMT

So here we are, finally together after too many weeks, too many months. It's been a delirious last few days in the best possible way. Right now he is asleep on the couch, exhausted still from the past months and because Afghanistan is nine and a half hours ahead of us (yes, a half). It has been as if he never left. We are so happy to be together.

This picture is emblematic of us, really. Rebecca used to tease us that we were always punching and kicking each other in the kitchen on Washington in New Orleans, doing our little flirtatious martial dance left over from our first years together at the karate/kickboxing gym. S is going to take our equipment back with him because some of the special forces guys he works with are interested in buying it from us, and since these days I'm more interested in zen than boxing, and S would like to pick up Aikido when he gets home (and I'll probably join him), we don't really need three pairs of focus mitts anymore, let alone thai leg kick pads and all those gloves. We have a lot of equipment.

The tee. S's last commander had them made up for PT. The new commander, though, wants his own tee, so these are now useless. Yes, for every commander there is a new t-shirt. The souvenirs of war! S told me that at Camp Phoenix, where many soldiers spend their entire tours (and where one high-ranking officer gave all the officers under him bronze stars for nothing more than staying safe on the most secured base in the country -- a lot of honor in that, isn't there?), soldiers can pay to have a flag flown for ten minutes and their picture taken beneath it, and get to take the smallish flag home with them as a memento of the war. Curious; not too many of the men like S who spend weeks on end on missions along the Pakistan border have much interest in these miniature flags, let alone posing for a picture beneath them blowing in Afghan winds.

S is full of stories. We spent the first couple of days talking and listening to each other. Some of his stories I'll be able to share here, but some he'll have to share himself, hopefully when he's home for good early next year. When his contract expired, he emailed his friend from his unit stationed on the other side of the country and told him that he was officially out of the army. His friend, whose contract expires in a couple of days, answered back, "Please tell me you're writing me from the United States!" Alas, he wasn't. He was north of Asadabad in a small fire base on the northernmost extension of the coalition (though not the northernmost border of the country -- yes, there are whole provinces we have yet to explore four years after the invasion). Some of the stories have to do with the overwhelmingly screwed up priorities of national guard leadership. Some about the desires of the vast majority of Afghans to have peace and stability and an end to war. Some others are about how most of the Taliban remnants and other "ACMs" (Anti-Coalition Militias) are foreign fighters from Pakistan and the Arabian peninsula, including a number who were "trained" in Iraq. There are stories of egregious lack of planning leading to the deaths of soldiers (American and Afghan), just as there are stories of lack of support and equipment leading to near-misses and unnecessary anxiety. Finally S is at a base that has proper equipment and support, but he considers himself lucky as some of the men he worked with the first six months are still stuck with nothing. The biggest question S has is why we're not fighting the war on terror, but again I'll leave it to him to go into that one. I have a feeling he'll be writing up a storm when he comes home for good.

The weather has cooperated this week so far. Fair in the day, finally some rain in the night. There is just the hint of autumn in the air, especially in the mornings. We don't have any big plans, just more hanging out and being together. It's such a joy!! I'll try to write again soon, perhaps about John Kerry's speech today on the Katrina Administration and their heartbreaking failures in our lost city in the south and "over there," that war-of-liberation turned civil war in Iraq. Afghanistan remains far off the television screen, buried most often in the bowels of the daily paper, brought out to the open only with elections or particularly disturbing bouts of violence. Soon S will be away from there and home, home. I can't wait.

Bush's banana republicanism and S's homecoming

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:31:55 GMT

Jackson Square is the center of the French Quarter. Tarot card and palm readers are usually set up on the pedestrian ways on the side of the square, with mimes and street performers sprinkled between them along with a handful of artists selling prints of Quarter scenes. The Quarter represents New Orleans to most Americans, though when I lived there I went to the Quarter infrequently, and when I did it was usually to eat at a specific restaurant or to go the market. The heart of the city was out in the neighborhoods where there were fewer tourists and more day-to-day living, where a tuba player might walk down the street playing his horn while a handful of uniformed school children made their way home at the end of the day.

Last night Bush chose to give his speech at Jackson Square in the heart of the only New Orleans he knows, a place he spent forgotten time during his long, cloudy days of alcohol and drug abuse. From his speech, we learned that Bush is still capable of reading a speech someone else wrote and that Jackson Square sustained no visible damage. That's good.

My maternal grandmother Marceline used to say "the proof is in the pudding," and when it comes to Bush's endless promises gift-boxed in righteous rhetoric, his words are meaningless until his actions rise up to them. So far, there's been no pudding, only rotten leftovers here at home and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm sure his speech worked for many who don't seem to mind when his actions mismatch his rhetoric so profoundly. Bush's numbers will rise again, and Rove will be triumphant once again, secure in the president's popularity and giving Rove the time and energy to devote to his new project, the rebuilding of New Orleans. It's a sick joke, really, having Karl Rove, a political opportunist and manipulator and nothing more, in charge of the most massive rebuilding effort since FDR's New Deal. Considering how hostile Bush and his crew are to government (in terms of service, not in terms of budget -- they have grown the largest, most inept government in our nation's history, spending trillions and getting only chaos in return), I think it's fair to say Rove will fail just as his boss has failed time and time again.

Yes, Bush has taken "responsibility." But what does that matter? What are the consequences of Bush taking responsibility? Will he fire Chertoff? Remove FEMA from the National Security umbrella, and appoint actual emergency management experts as the directors of both agencies? Will he order an independent investigation, and courageously acknowledge that such an investigation might find him most at fault?

Frankly, I have no tolerance for excuses or his words words words. Too much has come to pass. He has failed on so many levels, for so many years now, that I trust nothing he says and expect nothing but more failures. Bush is a corrupt, greedy liar whose policies have caused the deaths of thousands here and elsewhere. His only interest is in enriching corporate interests (and that goes for corporate churches, too). Considering that Halliburton has already received the first rebuilding contract, and we already know that they are a corrupt corporation that cheats the government at every opportunity, it is pie-in-the-sky foolishness to expect anything other than our continued swift spiral downward to the bottom levels of banana republicanism.

Iraq is in a civil war. In Afghanistan, a seventh candidate has been shot dead. Louisiana and Mississippi were already bastions of corruption and cronyism, which means things will only get worse with Halliburton in town. And tens of thousands of Americans are still stuck in shelters, some ineptly run, with no hope in sight for a future away from our toxic policies.

There are no excuses for such failed governance. Bush should be impeached. I think Nagin should be fired, too, and while we're at it, why not fire Blanco. I think she and Nagin are at significantly less fault than Bush, but they are still at fault. The entire government, on all levels, failed the people of New Orleans, and there is no reason to think they will be capable of rebuilding the city in the thoughtful manner we need right now. Blanco and Nagin were inheritors of a tradition in Louisiana of catering to the few wealthy residents at the expense of the many not-wealthy residents. The "talented tenth" of the African-American community ruled New Orleans just as the white political families rule the state. They all have had narrow interests and I doubt that will change now. In terms of the federal government, there is no reason to think that an administration who has said they are "rebuilding" Iraq while deconstructing it and throwing it deeper into chaos can do any better in New Orleans, a disaster that was made worse by their ineptitude and negligence.

I continue to be shocked and dismayed that so many Americans are comfortable with our shift toward fascism. On my brighter days I think it is ignorance that is driving so many to continue to support this disaster of an administration, but on my darker days I think it is greed and selfishness and false patriotism. The future is always uncertain, but sometimes it is at least bright. Now it's not so bright at all.

Yesterday I had lunch with two New Orleans friends who are up here staying with their folks in the suburbs. They are engaged, Dave and Dianne, and Dianne is from England so she is not eligible for FEMA assistance. The whole thing has been incredibly hard on her. She has been depressed and anxious, aggravated by living with her future in-laws, of course. Their car is floating somewhere in New Orleans, so they took the train in from Dave's parents' house thirty miles away, then I picked them up and we went to Devon Avenue for a delicious Indian lunch. After, I drove them to the Red Cross down at Racine and Roosevelt, a community center surrounded by our city's newest incarnation of public housing. I just got an email from Dianne and it seems the Red Cross was extremely helpful, giving her a debit card with over $600 to help them the coming weeks. They bought plane tickets back to New Orleans for next Friday. They don't know if they'll be able to stay at all (probably not), but they should be able to get into their apartment and collect some of their belongings, and if by chance the car hasn't floated away, they'll take a road trip to Houston or somewhere else and sleep on someone else's couch. I know so many nomads, and they are the lucky ones, people with family and friends and resources. Imagine all who aren't so lucky.

Tonight my darling S comes home for his 15 days. He gets in after 8 p.m after traveling for more than 48 hours: Baghram to Kuwait, Kuwait to Germany, Germany to Dallas, Dallas to Chicago. He called from Kuwait yesterday morning to tell me what flight he will be coming in on and to tell me how he had been stuck there for hours, waiting and waiting. I've been a crafty beaver around the house since I returned from Houston, hanging curtains in the living room, straightening up and doing a deep clean. I've been on the road for months now, leaving the place to the peculiar dust the city produces and sends floating down around us. The weather has cooled off here. The trees are losing their leaves, though not from fall color. They are starved for water and their leaves are turning brown in patches. We had a sprinkle last night. What we need, though, are days and days of soaking rain.

I don't know how much I will post the coming two weeks. I suspect I'll continue to write fairly frequently, now with S seated next to me on the couch, he on his ibook, me on mine. I know he's got a lot of writing to do himself, from sending emails to the miriad of friends who he's not had time to write, to the grants he needs to look into for his fieldwork in Mexico next year. There will be a time after this war for him, we hope. I have no idea what he will want to do the next two weeks. Our kitchen cabinets arrived and I'm going to store them here in our place. Who knows. He gets antsy after a few days of not doing much, usually. This is a different situation, though, so maybe he'll want to just hang around and not do or think too much. I'm flexible.

I'll try to post a few homecoming pictures tomorrow. I can't believe this day has finally come. It's been seven months since I saw him last, and nine since he left our house. So much time has passed. It's crazy.