The Gun Line MkIII

I was looking at the number of posts I have added since we got here…  Not that many, actually…

Compared tot he work-up, and the story of my journey to get here, it’s almost anti-climactic.  The Ernie Pyle in me was expecting a series of “Joe Blow” stories; piece regaling to heroic exploits of daring-do, punctuated with the poignant observations of a soldier at war…

Wellll, not so much…  Frankly, there hasn’t been much in the way of excitement, and I didn’t want to bore you with the same old “Nothing happened today…” day after day…

On the other hand, the fact that there’s nothing to report is a good thing (ref: My previous post, where I said pretty much the same thing…)

If I were 20 years younger, I would be absolutely humming with supressed frustration, wanting to get into the fight and mix it up in grand style.  I would be absolutely inconsolable because, right now, there is absolutely nothing exciting going on.  The mission that we send outside of the wire are in the most danger, but even then, the excitement factor is low, because you’re out there looking for signs of something that the bad guys may have emplanted days ago, and have long since left the area, so even if they get lucky, there’s not much that the youn war-fighter can do but brush himself off and continue on.  The “Falluja-type” operations are a distant memory, and the challenge not falls to the NCOs to keep their young charges focused on a job that can be mind-numbingly dull.

Which, in the big picture, is a good thing, when viewed with the eye of an old soldier: Excitement is bad, boring is good, means that there’s a pretty good chance that everybody will come back with all of their fingers and toes…

Sooo…

They told me that I had to go on Pass, to Quatar, for 4 days of fun and frolic…

I won’t go into detail about the amenties here.  The elaborate Force Protection Measures exist to make this place as safe a haven as can possibly be, so that war-fighters can totally relax, let their hair down, and take a deep breath without concern, and I won’t do a thing to change that…

But there is beer…  3 a day…  Which also happens to be the safe limit for your humble scribe, without treading into the realm of “let’s-make-a-s;obbering-fool-out-of-ourselves”.  Enough time in a dry country, and you become a really cheap drunk!

And the rest of the day, you do…  Nothing…  You loaf around, beholden to no one, wandering about in t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, your hardest choice is at which venue do you want to have your daily booze ration, and practicing for the evening goof-off…

For a young warrior, with his hair on fire, it could even be maddening…  For us old long-fangs, it is paradise…  Being able to sit back in air conditioned comfort, relaxing, pondering, moving at “dead slow”…

…Paradise, I tell you…