Memoreis part XIII

Part XII

I talked with her today. She was excited to hear my voice, no matter how distant I seemed to think I was being. She said she missed me. I don’t know why really? I’ve been gone for ten months; I have eight more to go on my tour. Eight more months until I’m out of this shit-hole of a county, eight more months until I’m back home and in her arms for the rest of my life, no interruptions this time. The uniform I’ve worn for nineteen and a half years put away for good. Put in the back corner of a closet, the same closet I’ve been hiding out in since I was seventeen.

I’m thirty-six years old this month. My body feels much older, especially in this place. It’s blistering hot during the day and oh so cold at night. When the sun goes down the temperature drops so quick that it feels like I’m in the Artic. I wake up from the cold shivering, my body attempting to warm itself. I don’t tell her these things though, she only needs to know that I’m okay, that I’m safe, that I love her, and I’ll be home soon.

She worries so much when I haven’t written for a few days. She just knows that something bad is going to happen to me. I tell her that she should think like that, but still she does. I tell her I’ve been okay this long and God wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me when I’m so close to happiness, retirement, to home. She doesn’t believe in God. She says that my God may want me to live, but their God wants me dead. So who’s God is right? She has a point, I guess, but I don’t like to think about that.

She calls this war the Twenty-first Century Crusade. That the American President has merely replaced the tenth century Pope and the Army has replaced the Christian Crusaders. That this war is not about weapons of mass destruction or about freeing a county of a ruthless dictator, it’s about the spread of Christianity. Never mind the fact that a good percentage of American soldiers are not Christian, the point is the man in the White House claims to be, and the Christianization of these people is his goal.

It’s hard for me to disagree with her. I don’t like to think of myself as a pawn for a religious cause, but again, she has a point. She worries I will die on this crusade, some one else’s mission, some mans fucked up crusade to rule the world. Cesar tried this once, so did the early Popes, Napoleon, and Hitler. They all fell short of their mission and it cost their countrymen countless lives. But they didn’t seem to care, because their God had spoken to them and said it was what needed to be done.

So how are we any different? I’ve seen kids die over here. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers killed or so catastrophically injured that their lives and the lives of their loved ones will never be the same. I wear in my sink a permanent reminder of the cost of this war. I will carry it with me the rest of my life. I wonder if the cost has been worth it. Is the price finally right? Or has America yet to see the true toll that we will pay in the pursuit of this American Jihad.

She doesn’t understand that I’ve cried enough for an entire country, we all have. Every memorial for a fallen friend we attend sheds more tears. Enough to fill an entire lake if they were all collected and poured into a ditch. I’m not capable of crying for myself, or even her, only for my lost friends and there have been many, too many to count.

Has their sacrifice been worth this crusade? Or will the Chief continue to turn his head and sink from his responsibility for their loss, in his blind pursuit of this Twenty-first Century Crusade