Forward Deployed, Forward Deployed

"Where I live, there are rainbows...  life in the laughter of morning, and starry nights."

Back home, there are beaches.  There are trees.  There are hot chicks in bikinis.

Things aren't monochromatic.  Things aren't dead.

Dreary, dreary, dreary.

Leaving a piece of Americana wherever we go.

"Goooooood morning Viet...  Iraq!"

Nameless.  Faceless.  ____less.

"Keoni wuz hea!"

Leaving our marks wherever we go.  Because in the big picture, we are all transient personnel.  "I existed too!"

Wah wah wah.

Just in case Charlie is outside the wire, ready to start shit.

"It ain't me, it ain't me.  I ain't no fortunate..."

Actually, it IS me.

"Welcome to the 4077th."

 Semi-permanent structures for semi-permanent people.

But there's more than just gray aircraft and desert colored buildings.

The converted shipping containers behind the 12+ foot blast walls house people.

To Roethlisberger's credit though, he did not rape a child.

People who like to watch football and follow the Super Bowl.   

Sometimes I think my life here is an episode of MASH.

People with lives.  People who are interesting.  People who love.  People who are funny.  People who smile and joke around.  People who are assholes.  And people who are bored, desperate to find something to do.

I'm pretty sure those patches aren't authorized.

Sometimes I think in the middle of all this abstraction, analyses, and "systems," it's forgotten that at its most basic level, the people who constitute this system (or any system) are individuals.  Not nameless, faceless, robots in tan flight suits and desert colored uniforms that mindlessly march around. Unfeeling.  Uncaring.  Maybe they conform, but also maybe they resist.  And they assert themselves within the framework that they're in, because ultimately they occupy multiple frameworks, even if they're wearing a flight suit.

It's something to consider.  This doesn't invalidate abstraction and theory, be it Marxism, or feminism, or screw the military-ism (which I'm a big fan of), or any other type of -ism.  But at the same time, maybe people are complicated.  And the abstractions and theories describe "reality," helps to interpret and contextualize it, but does not define it, in and of itself.

Maybe life is complicated.

And maybe behind this blank empty picture, which gives off a certain impression,

Is this.

Or this.

Because I guess people can be defined by the relationships they forge with each other. 

In the film SLC Punk, the main character, Steven "Stevo" Levy, has a decision to make:  stay true to his "punk" roots, sticking it to the man, and maintaining his notions of ideological purity, or cut his hair and go to Harvard law school.  Basically, he has to choose whether or not to "sell out."  The implied answer (according to the film) is that the question doesn't really have any meaning.  In most cases you can't "sell out" to anything because there's nothing to "sell out" to.  People are individuals. 

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing, hand waving and going "abracadabra."

As the van got dirtier, more things were written.  Some had to be censored.

But whatever.  Ideological purity is overrated.  It's all gray areas anyway, some are closer to black and white than most, but it's still all gray, depending on how you define it.

"Deuces," Iraq.  It's been fun.

Two months and eleven days left until freedom (and not in the overtly patriotic fox news way, but in the sense of "I get to go home.")