Saved by a Soldier

I’ve spent all day at the unemployment office, finding out that there are no jobs in three counties that match my qualifications (which I already knew) and taking the most absurd standardized tests in the world, sitting next to a meth addict whose leg was bouncing around like it was on fire. A waste of a day, which would have been more productive had I spent it in my usual way—reading job listings, sending out resumes, and blogging, which at least engages my mind, as opposed to tests with questions like “If you purchase three widgets that each cost $1.99 including tax, what is your total?” Not only am I not exaggerating, I also got issued a calculator to figure out the answer.

The day may have been a total waste had a guy not sat down across from me and starting chatting me up. It turned out he’d just returned from a two-year tour in Iraq. He’d done street patrols; dangerous work. “Back in one piece,” I commented, and he nodded sagely. “I made it a priority to stay alive,” he said, with the kind of halting assurance that betrayed his understanding how little difference that actually makes. He kindly indulged my urge to pepper him with questions—in fact, I think he was quite pleased to be asked—and gave me some interesting insight into what it’s like over there and what’s happening.

I asked him when he thought we’d be out of Iraq, and he said he thinks there will be a reduced presence for at least a decade, and that we’ll never be completely out; he compared the situation to Korea. I asked when he thought troops would start coming home in significant numbers, and he said a few months. When I said, “In time for mid-term elections?” he said no, that had been the plan for a long time, not in any kind of defensive way, just very matter-of-factly. I asked him about the Iraqi troops’ training, and he said there were lots of well-trained troops; he’d worked with them. The biggest problem, he told me, was getting the Iraqis to do patrols on their own, because they wanted to protect the American soldiers by surrounding them. They were, he said, grateful.

We talked about lots of other stuff, too—he had seen the disgusting camel spiders, and other horrible bugs and lots of lizards...and horrific things he didn’t talk about. He told me about how most of the car- and suicide bombers were coming in from Iran and Syria, and explained how they got into Iraq. He told me about the weather, about the food, about the outsourced cooks who use too much pepper and serve too much rice, about MREs, about the pleasure of warm meals, about how much more he’d get paid to do the same job as a civilian. He told me about the elections, and the possibility of civil war, and I listened.

“We had a civil war,” he said. “Even after we got our government working. And how long did that take?”

“I think we’re still working on it,” I said, and he agreed.