Vegas or Bust!

One thing that is certain around here is that everyday someone is coming and someone else is going; esp. those short tour Air Force types. You meet all sorts in this small constrained universe and sometimes for reasons explainable to few you build close bonds with folks that may very well last a lifetime. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ve met a couple – Mr BUA, Free, Dave… Well the day has come to say Fair winds and Following seas to yet another such a friend. Tonight Capt Kj heads home. As has become a sort of tradition for me and since she is a glamorous blogger in her own right I asked her to guest blog on her exit. Based on our high-minded, intellectual conversations I fully expected a profound expose summarizing her time her. But true to her blogging form she gave me... Well she gave me exactly what she should have… A true Capt KJ Blog perfect for Glamour Magazine. See you on the other side sis...

OK... you asked for it. Not sure it's that funny, but anyway, it's a snapshot from the mind of a very strange and disturbed individual who uses wars as a way to recover from ended relationships.

My war of breakups

I thought that, in my guest blog for Hollywood, I'd address something sophisticated, in depth, and meaningful. Yeah, so for most people, this whole Iraq war has been about big things--oil, industry, dictators, trans-national terrorist groups, government conspiracies, impending fundamentalist theocracies (take your pick: Islamic or Christian), and that kind of thing. For me? Not so much.

I was discussing this with Hollywood and another friend a week or so ago, and realized that this war has been about my breakups. I remember the countdown to the Iraq War because I'd just broken up with a boyfriend the night before the ultimatum was announced. During the resulting sleepless nights, I kept the TV on and was quite cheered--OK, maybe the word is "distracted"--by signs of chaos and destruction... oh, excuse me, "shock and awe" that lit up our screens all night long during the initial phase of the war.

By the time the "good TV" portion of the war was over, I was done with the worst of the shock and awe of breaking up with the guy and I was ready to move on into the rest of my life. I was going to be moving (from Maryland to Ohio) in a couple months, so my time and energy went into that.

However, my involvement in the war personally was also precipitated by a breakup. This breakup was not my idea (yeah, he sprung it on me out of nowhere--from my perspective, that is), and it was correspondingly hard to get over. I moved (from Ohio to Alabama) and continued to find myself hung up on the guy, so much so that I never really moved into my apartment (after six months I still had unopened boxes sitting around and nothing actually on the walls), and it was getting into that time of year when, the year before, we'd been starting up our relationship...

So when the opportunity to deploy opened up, I jumped on it. I knew that, heck, if I can't avoid the one-year-anniversary of... you name it... then I'd at least be able to be somewhere that would keep me too busy to think about it. And so I landed in Baghdad. And at the year anniversary of my breakup, here in Baghdad, I thought about it briefly (I think?), and then moved on. A day later we had a rocket attack and I forgot all about it.

So this war has started with a breakup and then REALLY started for me with... a breakup. So I'm thinking I need a breakup to announce the end of the war. I'll work on that.

Capt. Kj