No place like Home
You can read the newspaper, turn on the TV news, run your RSS aggregator til it smokes. Its hard for me to come home from work, my safe little job. Shake the numbed disengaged weariness from me and have any chance of relating to or comprehending the life that the marines and soldiers in Iraq wake to face each day. I was in the military, and I can't do it. I can't breech the gap. I can acknowledge, remember, sympathize, construct. But I can't understand, cannot feel it.
I recall being surprised and disappointed to realize that my friends and family had no true understanding no understanding at all of what life in the military was like. And then again what was there to understand, we weren't even being shot at. I spent my second two years stateside, "on the beach", at the Pentagon and then left the Navy to go to college. By the time I got to college I didn't care much if my family and friends back home understood what my life was like. I was older and had my own life to live. Those first two years with the RVAH squadron loom large though. Overseas, cut off from American daily life and pop culture. I watched little or no television for two years saw no current movies (except for Animal House), certainly heard no new music, this was a led zeppelin, pink floyd, nazareth, golden earring, amboy duke, deep purple, elvin bishop intensive period. Scarcely improving the following two years. On a carrier in those days, there was no real connection to to the states except through individual personal mail (the kind that involved paper and Fleet Post Office addresses).
Last Monday I read an article in New York Times
G.I.'s in Iraq Tote Their Own Pop Culture. Just trying to assimilate the incredible difference between my experience then and this world now, the active attempt, brought me as close as I've been to what these men and women are living through over there. An in-country wide music server? We had the office boombox which we deliberately used to drive each other nuts (important when your confined to a ship at sea). Patrols in Humvees, 10,000 guerilla's trying to kill you, and your iPod. The article throws up a number of facts which the auther seemed a little tentative about. And which left me wondering just how they would integrate into the non-reducible experience of military duty- which requires comraderie and focus. The varied availability of news media sources not controlled by the military. The continued presence of mass pop culture, not in the form of the communal experience of an Adrian Cronauer, whom the article mentions, but individualized, atomized, private. Last is the assertion that there is no alcohol, "drugs aren't the thing anymore", and that MP3s have replaced it. MP3s are wonderful, truely - even those AAC ones Apple sells. Another couple of months like this last; though, and these soldiers will find themselves something that will take them further away than a song.
I often feel that the best thing the Navy ever did for me was to cut the cords that connected me to daily American media culture for the better part of four years, I never looked at any of it quite the same again. A play of light and shade against the wall, so many Javanese shadow puppets animated by the flickering of the fire alone.
11:41:21 PM  ;;
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