I thought about overdosing, or putting a 9 millimetre to my head, after I served. I felt like that before, but I didn’t know it. I say this without depression, too, realize. A debate, I suppose; it was pragmatic, I weighed it with a cold reverence for nothing. I weighed the options of living and dying and FELT little difference. I COMPREHENDED the largest chasms of differences… ‘Death was only ignorance’ I could say. I could also say ‘Bush orchestrated 9.11 to purchase the conditions for the near ultimate power he’s had’. I could say a lot of things. And maybe one day I will… 

But today I’ll ramble and say this again: I wasn’t depressed. Which is the hardest part people have of coming to terms with this stagnant debate I carried. ‘I was tired and apathetic,’ I try to tell them. It was just a deep tiredness. 

I suppose I have to say a little about myself, as this initial style now obligates me to do so. I’m educated. A dusty degree in anthropology that took me six years to achieve. I started as a history major, moved to philosophy then psychology, and finally landed in anthropology after someone said I’d have better luck landing a teaching job. I didn’t, however, land a teaching job and never really wanted one. I was a substitute math teacher for a bit, had to bust these two adventurers for smoking pot in a stairwell in the school and I felt bad about that. 

Possibly, I joined the force to be something of a Hemmingway. But I’ve since realized that having some such experience like war is no prerequisite for anything. I mention this now because I have no idea why I started telling you I had to bust these kids I felt sorry for in 1993 during 8th grade geometry. 

Just as easily I could paint this quaint picture of running, ducking, and blasting rounds from my rifle. 

I’ll tell you. It wasn’t that bad. War, fighting. At that time in my life that’s what I wanted. It’s needed and it should be mandatory for the youth of a nation. What if Bush had served? What if Cheney had? What if there weren’t minds to write and carry out the ‘new American century’. Perhaps then they wouldn’t have set explosives in those towers. Perhaps then they’d have thought that hegemony might not be worth the egregious cost they shrugged at. 

But it created a deep purpose and passion. Everything was certain and this was the exact opposite of everything I’d known before. 

We fished in the Euphrates one day. Pulled out this strange catfish type eel. I’d not be surprised to hear anyone who ate anything from such a sludge of a river would die within days. 

I’ve also heard the Lebanese Prime Minister mention he is going to sue the nation of Israel for the deliberate targeting and destruction of facilities that caused incredible damage to the Lebanese environment, including the eastern Mediterranean coastline they share. 

It takes a unique person to be able to whittle down a history into something coherent and run with it. I don’t have such skill. I can, however, list the things that happen to me in paragraph form. 

This first, though, I have trouble finding purpose. I have trouble conquering my feelings with my thoughts. I come to a realization of something about myself and I feel I should therefore be able to sink some thought on top of it and bury the unwanted emotion. I have trouble with that. And that is a large factor of my serving. 

Also, I served in the Peace Corps, which was a lazy battle with boredom after I became acquainted with the new environment. I was actually a ditch digger there in Honduras and it was incredibly stupid. I dug ditches so coffee growers would have a latrine to shit and piss into. Instead of on the high slopes between the clear-cuts where it’d filter down into the water supply of the small village. 

In the desert I shot a young man in the face. It was one of my first gigs. For a long time I was sitting on a pipe far away from any city –looking at a lot of porn, and googling high school friends– staring at an empty horizon, assuring no one would erupt the chain of oil. 

I heard the other day that the Alaskan pipeline has found a hole and they’ve shut it down. This stoppage has actually had no affect on anything as the Market is currently enjoying a rebound and oil is temporarily at a several week low. I’ve recently dropped a few extra dollars into Google and Yahoo. Rupert Murdoch, I’ve learned, is the new owner of MySpace.com, something I find intriguing as big media is apparently reaching down between their legs to fondle and own what was once considered the exact type of thing that would “save.” What exactly it’d save you could tell me better… 

After babysitting the pipeline they moved me to escorting figure heads of the new government when outside the Green Zone. This, I hated, we were so damn mother-fucking conspicuous. Both of these were a strange role of war I was not anticipating. 

My next gig I could appreciate: destroy all arms caches and disclose insurgent locations and hot-spots. Fuck yeah. So at night, we’d use this battery-ram and topple doors at the slightest tip. One of the first times I led this sort of thing a young man popped out from behind a door as we were securing the location. Travis and Ray were hesitating, trying to calm a raving old beard with a man-dress. Toby was behind me and this woman told us it was only the two of them there. But we made the rounds and upon entering a room a man jumped out and that was it for him. 

That was the first person I’d killed and I suspected more from it. For some reason I thought it would be magical in the sense that it’d instantly change me. It was something I similarly thought when I was 16 and lost my virginity. The biggest shock was that nothing changed. 

An old friend is an aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin. He doesn’t engineer missiles or bombs but I wish he did. It would be more poetic and funny… instead he studies solar flares. But during our senior year of high-school, when were weren’t playing music together or tripping, we were out smoking enormous joints and drinking rum in the middle of Minnesota cornfields. Our telescopes pointing high into the atmosphere, observing the twirling heavens. The cratered and missile-like moon torpedoing through the sky… For that object we’d have to move the scope constantly as we chased it, 238,857 (on average) miles away. I almost believed in God when first viewing the nebula between Orion’s legs. But that was just from an inner bliss Ihad then, standing in the remnants of a crop of corn, high on possibility, with a best friend I felt as close to as I felt anyone could be. That was also the time I was discovering Pink Floyd and reading Bertrand Russell. Giving up on religion first through the absurdity and hypocrisy of Christianity, then on the beautiful patterns and conclusions of Logic. 

But I’m sober now, 15 years later. And by a conservative, administration recognized number, 42,358 Iraqi civilians have died. The Lancet says it’s something like 655,000, this is probably too low. Three quarters of a million are internal refugees. 2,596 US Military personnel have died, including Toby. 115 UK military personnel have also died. The number of journalists that have died has been 77. 

Basically, I joined for the same reasons I suspect those journalists did. I felt like I was documenting something, I wanted to participate and I wanted to serve in something bigger than myself. I was part of something out there and I almost felt as if I was part of the anti-war agenda –we all knew how absurd it was. 

Beyond any right or wrong, or logical or advantageous aspect of this adventure, I was part of something. I was provided with an incredible, grand sense of purpose and belonging. And as absurd as this sounds, that was worth the 18 human beings I killed. 

There is a chance some of this was made up during my stint for Peace in the Corps, but that is suspect and borderline ridiculous –mostly there on the mountains coast I drank with my Indian counterpart and surfed in El Salvador when I could. I do feel slightly inclined to “make a difference” now with the rest of my life and I probably wouldn’t feel that now if I hadn’t killed those people over there in the sand-pit. 

But it’s not a burning passion to ‘make a difference’. It’s just chugging along, sluggish, and non-proximate. I didn’t kill myself because that would be a statement of something I don’t have. I don’t have a statement. And now the idea of destroying the time I have seems comic. And it is. 

I joined the force to belong. Instead of to fight, it didn’t matter what there was to fight for, there is nothing to fight for. And I signed up for the Peace Corps because I wanted to move to Latin America and speak Spanish. I have reasons for things and they feel right but they feel like the opposite of why I should do them. The ‘right decisions for the wrong reasons’ is brought to mind… and fuck, I wish I hadn’t written this. But… whatever. I’m going to turn on my bed and look out the window into this desolate Mexican Pacific. I can negate this entire history of the world with this turn of my head. 

With this simple undisturbed constant. I can erase my serving in those two disparate entities. And for that matter I can erase my childhood and the fact that I’m ‘getting old’. I could smoke opium if I had it. I could write a novel about Fallujah or wandering like a confident idiot in Honduran slums. A combat knife tucked into my pants. I could do many things. And I didn’t always know that. I did many things without knowing I could do them. But now I choose to do nothing with my freedom. 

I look across the room at my surfboard and I contribute to the world by not destroying it. By not being a factor. By having little to no impact. This small and unknown writing, here, is the most impact I’ll probably ever have in this latter chapter of my life. 

So now I really end it. Look out the window and wait for another session. I have a date with a Mexican woman tonight. Eight years younger, she is. And to her I have a small fortune. It would be a great act to give it to her. I want to. But she might not be here tomorrow. Today, I continue to look out across the blue from this tiny shack here in my swaying hammock.