DEC 01 2014 BY BRYAN 

From the Middle East: I walk back to my current assigned “home” across the FOB (aka Forward Operating Base). It is a windy night. The wind is steady and strangely cold for the Middle East. Oddly the dust that so often accompanies its friend, the middle eastern wind, remains settled on the ground beneath my boots.

Silence pervades and is only interrupted by the occasional rattling chain, creaking door or fluttering piece of paper. There is no gunfire tonight; another oddity that I would notice the absence of gunfire more so than its presence.

There is no “air”, or helicopter flights, tonight, though I did see some lonely ghost like figures at the LZ (aka Landing Zone). The LZ building looks strangely out-of-place with a wooden plank porch so much like a train station platform or even a saloon in an old western movie. It belongs in another place and time.

The tethered Aerostat, a type of balloon-borne radar, is down. In fact, the only thing up is the half-moon with her single star companion, and we must all know that this is really one of the sky-wanderers (I want to say it is Saturn, but learn later… it was Jupiter). The only other light in the sky is a single bright red light hanging over the western wall of the FOB. It is on a tower that is not so very far away, but in the dim light it seems all the world like a blazing star…a great red giant on fire.

Today was a busy day with many convoys coming and going. A Major General visited. Then more convoys leaving mid-afternoon with none to return in the evening. But now, there is quite. Wispy sounds of the wind and rolling tumbleweeds across the open desert land.

As I pass the 252nd – Thunderbolts – HHC (Headquarters and Headquarters Company), a single soldier walks toward and then past me. He is carrying a firearm. Is it a musket? At first I think “yes”, and that tonight I was surely transported into some past Wild West frontier outpost.

This is not the case as, so clear even in the darkness, I see the gun he is carrying, an M-16. I make a half turn of my body to take in the real scene around me: the North Carolina flag flying steady and straight with the wind, the normally light-brown sepia color of the building and the dirty white of the “T-walls” beyond blend now into a kind of shadowy sepia-grey against the night. I may be in the Middle East in the 21st century, but did the Alamo not look like this also?

An interesting thought comes to mind. Our American flag stands in all conference rooms, halls, the dining facility, in the commander’s office and in the “Fallen Hero’s Room”. The Iraqi flag sometimes joins it, as in some of the conference rooms and the “Tea Room”. The North Carolina flag, however, flies high and proud in front of the HHC for each unit. Even the Iraqi officers have noticed the NC flag. None, not even the visiting generals will make comment upon it (I believe, and later learn, it is a National Guard thing). The 30th…the “dirty 30”…has earned much respect. They have fought hard in the past and have lost too many of late.

I turn and move toward my room stepping from the hard dirt road on to the gravel that I have come to detest. It crunches with an awkward feel beneath my boots. The wind is now a cold feminine hand caressing my neck, tickling the back of my head just below my hat. I step into the quiet chamber like room that is this year the home of a warrior-cowboy-monk.

Discover more Xplorer Journals and read more about XplorMor Team member Bryan.