Gary's Mostly Pointless Blog

Hi again, guys.

I’m in a different place now, not only physically but from a writing stand point as well.  I like Brad & Joe but they’re going to have to wait until I can figure out what to do with them.  Till then, I have a feeling that I’ll be writing more serious stuff like the following.

I was wondering when I’d start writing about my military experience and evidently enough time has passed.  A few years ago, I’m not sure I could get through writing something like this.

Here it is, my #FridayFlash of the week, “Homecoming”.

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HOMECOMING

Jake was tense walking through the airport, but he was used to tension.  This was a new and unfamiliar kind.  He had spent two and a half years in Iraq and had decided that he had spent his last Christmas in a war zone.  He was scheduled to be out of the army by March but the leave he had accumulated got him out a week into the New Year.  He had grown accustomed to tension; convoying on a “black” road, going door to door looking for insurgents, being on base when they had gone just a little too long without a mortar attack.  This was a different kind of tension.  “Maybe it’s just the jet lag,” he told himself.

He walked on to the baggage claim area and tried to let it sink in—“I’m not a soldier anymore”—but it rang false to him.  He frowned, adjusted his backpack and coughed.  His throat felt scratchy as it always did whenever he went longer than a few hours without a cigarette.  He passed by a kiosk and decided to buy a soda.

He waited in line behind a few men looking up at a TV mounted on the wall showing CNN.

“Those Washington clowns are at it again,” one man said.  “This whole country’s going to hell.”

“No thanks to Obama,” the other said.  “Yes we can.  Hmph.  More like, no we can’t.”

The men laughed and it made Jake feel uneasy.  Politics was never his forte, especially not in a warzone.  In a warzone there was no such thing as politics.  There was simply the mission and getting it done.  Whether you were for the administration or not, it didn’t matter.  It wouldn’t get you home any sooner.  Politics were just something else to make you miserable.

He gulped down the soda greedily and its sweet taste made him feel a little better.  He tossed the empty plastic bottle in a trash can.  He thought about his first deployment and how they burned their trash in a pit.

“We burn our shit too,” he once told his father.

“Really?” his father said eventually.  Jake grew accustomed to the lag over satellite telephones.

“Well, it’s not like we’ve got people to come haul it away or anything.  We don’t even have port-a-potties, really.  Just a plywood box, a plastic toilet seat and half of a fifty gallon drum.  Yep, we burn it and bury it.”

“You bury it?  Why?”

“So feral dogs can’t get at it.”

He thought about calling his dad and telling him that he was coming home, but he thought that it would be more fun to just show up.  Now he wasn’t so sure.  Everything seemed strange now.  He passed by large lighted billboards advertising better nail polish, better computers, better cars and better insurance.  The signs seemed far too aggressive, too threatening.  This was his hometown, where he grew up, and it felt foreign to him.  Everything seemed out of place and wrong.  Would his family be the same?

His mom had left years ago for someone with similar “habits” and his father did what he could.  Jake and his younger brother Ronnie pulled together and tried to ease the burden on their old man.  Ronnie was a smart kid, smarter than Jake, and had a real chance to go to college on a scholarship.  Jake pushed him to pursue it and urged him not to be in a position where he had to join the military to get what he wanted.  Ronnie was a junior in High School now; the same year Jake decided to join the Army.

Jake walked past a shop selling impractical gadgets of all sorts and he caught his reflection in the glass.  Jake was different than Ronnie.  Jake was fundamentally different from who he used to be.  The Jake that had been Ronnie’s age was almost unrecognizable to him.  Would he be unrecognizable to everyone he once knew?  He hoped not and kept walking.

By the time he reached the baggage claim area, his body was screaming for nicotine.  He saw that the conveyor belt on carousel for his flight wasn’t moving, so he went outside for a smoke.  The cold outside air rushed at him and he squinted as it hit his face.  He hadn’t quite gotten used to cold weather yet.  He fished his cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one and felt the buzz work its way up his legs, into his chest and to his arms.

All around him other smokers were on their cell phones.  That was something else he’d have to get used to.  He had grown accustomed to thinking of cell phones as a potential danger.  Most IED’s in Iraq were detonated by cell phones.  He tried not to think about it and watched the cars drive past the terminal.  A yellow taxi rolled past and with a Middle Eastern man behind the wheel.  “A hajji,” he thought and knew immediately how racist that was.  There was something else he’d have to get over.  “That may be cool in the box, Jake, but not here in the real world.”

BANG!

He reacted before he could think, ducking behind a concrete pillar.  “Small arms fire,” he thought, “coming from the left.”  He hunkered down, making as small a target as possible.  He thought quickly about what he could do, where he could run for cover and how not to be a victim.  Then he realized that the explosion he heard was a car backfiring.  He stood up slowly and could tell distantly that his hands were shaking.  He walked back inside, ignoring the looks from bystanders.

He would get his bag, hop in a cab and go home.  He would ignore the thought that real life would be hard.  He would ignore the fact that there would be no one around that truly understood what he was going through.  He would ignore the fact that he missed his home—his real one.