Lance Wants To Fight The War

WarBlog 8

9 May 2007

Perspective. It kills me. I know I don’t have the right perspective on this war because I never seem to grasp anything about it other than what’s right in front of my face. You can run numbers about it all day, but as good as they are about expressing value, you just can’t count on numbers to express the magnitude of war. My $250,000,000 jet. $70,000 in jet fuel. $1,000,000 in training each for us 3 pilots. An $8,500,000 Chinook in the back. All heading to Iraq at the same time as countless other aircraft from countless other locations. It’s like me telling you that the Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, can be as wide as 15 miles, and as deep as 1.6 miles. So fucking what? It sounds huge, but you never get the idea of just how big that is until you actually stand on the edge of that enormous hole in the ground and realize, “Shit! This is a huge effing canyon!” The problem with war is that no one will ever get the chance to have that perspective—to stand at the edge of the canyon.

Since we can’t wrap our heads around it, we don’t even try. Our flights to and from combat are comprised of the type of detached, inane chatter reserved for most frat houses. A recent flight to combat started with all of us comparing the various currencies we had in our wallets in order to prevent the constant white noise in our headsets from dissolving into our brains and making us fall asleep. As aircrew we fly to all sorts of countries (mostly shitty ones, thanks Uncle Sam!) with all sorts of different types of money. It’s a waste of time to remember that Turkey has Lira, most of Europe has Euro—except Great Britain—and that Kyrgyzstan has… umm… Dinar? Rubles? Fuck if I know, but that’s the point. To make things simple we call all foreign money doobers. That way when you’re stuck in BFE and scrambling into a taxi following a fight at a night club all you have to ask each other is, “Do you have enough doobers to get us back to the hotel?” On this flight I had 3 different types of doobers. Someone else had some Turkish doobers and we noticed that the guy on their money looked like some sort of creepy Houdini substitute whose only trick was making his sausage disappear in a windowless van parked near local playgrounds. Our discussion continued like this until the changing pressure in the cabin made someone fart. No one claimed the Howdy, so I finally asked, “who the hell farted?” Rebb finally owned up, to which Sharp responded, “I thought it smelled like semen.” After that we started putting on our body armor and running our combat entry checklist, chuckling to ourselves the whole damned time. We’re not running away from the realities of combat, but we’re not exactly embracing them either.

I’ve been shot at a few times in my short Air Force career. You’d think it’d be either one of those things that I’d block out and never want to talk about again, or it’d be one of those things that I’d brag about at the bar to get free drinks. Knowing my extreme hatred for my liver, you’d think it’d be the latter, but it’s actually neither. I nothing it. I couldn’t care less about being shot at. I guess it’s both a by-product of the fact that I know it’s not an extremely exclusive group to be a part of and also that I’ve never really felt threatened by it. What’s most disappointing about being a target of opportunity is the lack of feelings it has generated in me. I thought that if I was being shot at that I would discover all these reasons that I wanted to live. Fuck you, Hollywood, that’s not the case. All I could think of the first time I got shot at was, “I hope that doesn’t hit us. I don’t want to have to spend the night here in Iraq until our plane gets fixed. It’ll probably only hit the engine anyway. We can fly out of here on 3 engines, right? I wonder how much each of our engines cost. They’ve gotta be expensive. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, I do not want to have to spend the night here in Iraq. Oh good, we’re landing.” Seriously, these were my life-affirming, character-defining thoughts in the heat of battle. There were no thoughts of getting back home to see some wife or kids or parents or anything. Granted, I don’t even have two of those aforementioned things (fingers crossed on that second one), but it would have been nice to at least have the thought of something cross my mind. My friends, my family, Guitar Hero 2, that hot girl I saw in the gym the other day--even the NBA. I would have realized that I really wanted to live to see LeBron bring a title to Cleveland. It’s pathetic, but at least it would have been something. Instead, all I’ve realized is that I’m dead inside. How’s that for perspective?

I’ll take this opportunity to remind myself that I could have it much, much worse. My whiny, self-centered, and self-loathing ego is once again slapped across the face with the fact that my life is much safer than that of the guys on the ground. They face real life-threatening dangers on a daily basis and it probably causes them to gain some real perspective on their lives and lets them know what’s important, be it God, their families, or their buddies right there in the shit with them. Maybe that’s the only real way to stand on the edge of the canyon. I feel like a fraud. However to those on the outside looking in, I’m a hero. Perspective makes all the difference in the world.