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I’m pretty sure the first soldier to listen to the radio in the trenches a hundred years ago thought it was a pretty nifty idea.

I’m 32 and I’m going to war for the first time.  Only that’s bullshit, because I’ve been doing this for years, and I really should use quotation marks around “war.”  Maybe capitalize it, or use italics.  Because there’s war, and there’s War, and the two are kind of different.

Because if I were to ask a bunch of people to define war, I could probably get a decent definition.  It’s what happens when you take a bunch of people from one place and put them in another place, and then they kill the people there and the people there try to kill them right back.  But in this sense, it’s so much more.  Because it’s not like a fight you get into at a bar.  This sort of war is a process… it’s logistics and intelligence and computer support and hamburgers.  And I know how to do my little part in it, which up until a couple of months ago was hauling cargo bigger than a breadbox over a large body of water, over and over and over again.  

The other kind I know nothing about, because I’m a cargo pilot, and our stories are a little different than War.  Because in War, shit happens dramatically.  It’s like a  movie with more blood and the screaming doesn’t stop.  That stuff happens, but it hasn’t really happened to me.

So, there’s this disconnect between the two, and it makes it fucking surreal.

The only thing that stops people from losing their sanity the first time some one-striper rests his weapon against his leg to check facebook on his iPhone is the fact that everyone is more pissed about the wireless not working.  If your grandfather was heaving over the side of the liberty ship bound for Britain seventy years ago, today you’re watching Transformers on you 747.  Right now, I’m in a tent wearing dog tags, and the two things I’m most thankful for are the hot water in the showers and the power to charge my MacBook while I blog.

I’m 32 and I’ve done this hundred times and never before.  I’ve moved cargo all over the world, and have been doing it for the better part of a decade, but I’ve never sat down next to someone as a passenger and a troop and headed off to the Middle East.  We were always off in our own little world, and when we stopped, we went to our rooms and unpacked.  Here, it’s a transient tent city.  We take what space we can get, and everyone expands to fill it.  And because of that, I never needed to think about everything we carry.  Laptops.  Porn.  iPods. Sports Illustrated and the Economist.  Whiteboards (really, this guy was a little weird).  This isn’t the stuff in the prop department for the World War II movie.  At least the loofa the guy brought to the shower wasn’t.

Forensics is all about the fact that when two surfaces make contact, they both leave part of themselves on the other surface.  I’m pretty sure the oddities I’m encountering are thousands of years old; some Greek guy brought figs to Troy, and everyone thought that was a decent idea.  I kind of think that war is a bunch of things you do, and while combat is a unique thing I don’t feel qualified to write about, the majority of the tasks are  kind of mundane.  And when you’re not doing them, you bring stuff with you, and you get those things all over the war your fighting.