Strange, or maybe only undeservedly surprising, how brief coincidental alignment of the normally unrelated can bring new unanticipated ( unwelcome?) tangential enlightenment to the past. Yesterday dipping into Vollmann Rising Up and Rising Down and then this morning listening to The Battle of Evermore really paying attention to the lyrics for the first time. Together bring back vague shades of Deh Chopan in 2005--a new context. Gradually belatedly appreciating how alien these remaining experiences might be to those who have never come close to this. Sometimes feel like Roy Batty in Bladerunner he tries failsto pass some small bit of what he experienced just before he died (trying to preserve what he saw and hope preservation alone granted meaning to it?). My part it is the lonely feeling deep in the stomach as the helicopters flew away after leaving us deep in Talib territory hours from the nearest help, and that night the setting up in an exposed unimproved position in the Larzab Bowl on a small knob 200 meters or more from the nearest support watching signal fires light up across the valley and knowing a clever handful could pluck us from that position any time in the night, then the night next sitting and lying on a mud rooftop surrounded by Talib until nearly dawn sniping at us and creeping closer we hoping they didnt realize the compound only held a reinforced squad, then surrounded again on another earlier day in Mizan in 04 up against mountain ridges and then mounting up in our doorless soft skin Humvees to charge into their gathering point feeling like Custer and one guy telling me it was a good day to die (perhaps as good as any other, so why notJames Jones was right when he said wars are fought by dead men). Strange times all and in isolation they feel really meaningless but still essential to me..essential to me perhaps but the meaning of it allthe war, the politicslie outside me. The rest, the internal personal part, are nothing.
