Iraq War – Operation Iraqi Freedom War 48 – Camp Arifjan, Kuwait – 2003

I forgot to mention that on the 23rd of August we picked up beds. That’s right, beds. After 5 weeks of sleeping in the warehouses and another 5 or so sleeping on cots, we got beds. I happened to sneak by and greet 755 AG Co, the postal unit that was leaving home. Well, I asked them where they had gotten the beds that I saw around them and they said that some company just gave it to them when they first arrived. And the lieutenant in charge said that no one signed for it, because he didn’t sign for it. So I asked if I can come by and pick up a couple. Yeah, sure, he said, just come by tomorrow after we leave. Good thing I came by right when they did, too, because CPT Eng and CPT Baumbusch were already there trying to get dibs on these beds. So after that day 5 of us in this tent have been sleeping on beds comfortably. We tried to hook up more people but CPT Eng already took 2 for his own tent. It was a miracle having even gotten 5. Unfortunately, that meant 5 of us didn’t get the bed. But SGT Figueroa might be moving out of here soon, SFC Rodriguez wasn’t here to claim one because everyone else wanted one, Roberson didn’t want one to begin with, and Kulak wasn’t even here, and he doesn’t give a damn about it anyway. So we left out CPT Guardiano, but there wans’t much we could have done about that.

The letter I wrote on the 25th never got sent out. I figured that before I send anything hostile out, I should give it some time. I had written it because my step-father had told me that he doesn’t know where my anger towards Edward started, but that time away from home gives you that feeling that you’re left out and consequently makes you hostile. Something like that. My mother, when I called, had told me that she told Edward congratulations upon his failure at Ranger school. And I was enraged because that’s the same thing she had told me when I was to return home at Ft. McCoy 3 months ago. I still do not feel that her congratulations isn’t directed towards me but towards herself, for her own relief. And I suppose we’re all selfish beings, but I just didn’t like the way she was trying to make it sound like it wasn’t a selfish statement. I still don’t see how it isn’t. But what I do know is that I didn’t send the email. It was too vulgar, and it would have materialized into things that I didn’t want to get into. Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve focused on a few things I learned as a kid. There was a book I had read million times, a Jewish proverbs/story book where a father tells a son 3 lessons before he dies. I remember one of the first two, which was to ask a woman to marry him in the morning. So one day he goes and wants to ask this woman to marry him but waits till the morning, when he finds out that her beauty was veiled under makeup. The final lesson was to never act on anger at night. Always sleep on it, he said. So after having returned from a war one night, he comes back to his house when he hears his wife talking to someone in her room. He takes out a knife, ready to kill her when she comes out. But he decides to sleep on it, no matter how hard it was. And the next day he learns that he had become a father while he was away. I guess it’s a cheezy story, but it stuck with me. And now that I’m here and I’m stressed out, I believe I’ve been taking the last lesson to heart more often than not. I’ve been so frustrated so often that I would have acted out in anger. And I suppose I couldn’t sleep on my decision with Edward for a week like I had, but other times it has saved me some trouble. And trouble with my parents was the last thing I needed in this forsaken world. I let it go because relieving my frustration with such dangerous words was not a worthy tradeoff.

Now that we’ve been here for 2.5 months, it feels like I’m in a good rhythm. But the fact of the matter is, we’ve been gone for 7. It sure doesn’t feel like it, looking at it in that point of view, but at the same time, it feels longer than 7. Probably because we have another 4 or 5 months ahead of us. They’re going to Afghanistan next, the inspection team. I want to go. It is the only thing that will be on my mind for the next 4 weeks.

I’ve been continuing to practice the guitar but the days of quick improvements are gone. I can no longer just play and keep improving by the hour. I keep practicing and every week or so I would notice I have gotten better. But I need a lot more refinement and more practice with the strumming and barring and getting the chords down. I’ve gotten quite accustomed to plucking, but I could definitely work on that still, too.

I’ve decided to pick up smoking. Cigars, that is. To me, it feels like cigars are lot more innocent than cigarettes  seeing how you never inhale the sucker and just puff it all out. I never understood what that would actually do to you, until I smoked it one day on the 29 of August. It was a Monterrey Havana. Must have been cuban, I really don’t know. But the first puff didn’t feel like anything. So I said to myself this isn’t that bad. I remember having trouble lighting that sucker up. And I didn’t realize you gotta blow in air while lighting the cigar to help it light up faster. But when it’s so thick like that, it’s hard to do that. After about the 5th puff or so, I accidentally inhaled some of it. I couldn’t down it, and I couldn’t cough it off. But it wasn’t bad. After a while, though, having gone through a little over half the cigar, I got lightheaded. Bad. I felt like I just had 3 or 4 bottles of beer, and it hit me quickly and hard. The cigar itself was strong. Every puff I took after that I could definitely feel myself getting even more lightheaded. Before then all I had felt was tingling sensation in my mouth. It wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world, but it felt more like sugar than tobacco. And just touching it with my mouth felt like sugar, too. It was kind of strange, seeing how just touching it could do that to me. I smoked a Romeo and Juliet yesterday. This one was a cuban. Didn’t have much of a taste to it, but neither did the Havana. This one was much stronger, though. I barely got through half of it when I had to lie on my back for a while just to try and stop my head from spinning. I accidentally inhaled some again one time, but it wasn’t bad. Now here I am, still feeling a little dizzy. And my mouth still feels dirty after having done a pretty good job brushing it. I will probably never smoke one of those again. I didn’t like the fact that they’re so expensive ($5 or so, but someone just got it for me) and the fact that it was tasteless and too strong for my own good. I suppose everyone has a preference, but that wasn’t mine. One good that came out of it was that for the first time in the last 2 weeks, I slept peacefully at 10 PM. It was the best night’s sleep I had since about 2 weeks ago when I had gotten the beds.

I suppose I couldn’t go to sleep for the past 2 weeks is because I’ve been so stressed out. I don’t want to admit it, especially because I don’t really feel like I’m stressed, but I am. And I’m not the only one. Roberson does laundry at night because he can’t sleep. Contreras and Roberson work out late night too, because, they say, it helps them sleep. But I know Contreras isn’t getting any, since I see his flashlight going up every once in a while as I wait for myself to sleep at 2 AM. If anything, Miceli, Price, and Yankovich, oh and CPT Guardiano, are having a grand old time sleeping. But these are people that make more money here than back home and have no sweethearts or wives, although the average age for them is close to 30.

I’ve been sporadically receiving mail now, which keeps me very motivated. But one of my pet peeves is receiving too much mail at one time. Last week sometime I got 3 in one day. I was excited, but I would much rather have received 1 each in three days. But nevertheless it was just something I plainly needed.

One thing is for sure. Roberson does the strangest things sometimes. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he started pouring water into the cooler from his water bottle. And just a second before that he was talking about how there’s too much water and not enough ice in there. So he picks up the cooler and for some reason tips the whole thing over. So there it was, a cooler’s worth of water dripping down the tent. I guess we learned that the tent was lopsided towards my bunk and we learned pretty quickly. We started getting everything out of the way and got a broom to fence off the water.

Just 3 days ago on my day off I heard a loud boom. It wasn’t something falling, and it wasn’t a sonic boom. I had no idea what it was because it was coming from all directions. So I went outside. Turns out I wasn’t the only one because people were coming out of their tents wondering what it was. Then on my way in I heard it again. One loud SOB. Later that day I learned it was a call to arms drill. Well how the hell am I suppose to prepare for call to arms when I’m just learning what it sounds like?

On the 31st of August, the general came by again, General Ostenberg, in charge of 63 RSC, the regional support group I belong to as a reservist. He said this visit wasn’t official, but he heard that we were here and doing a great job, so decided to stop by. He’s possibly one of the most charismatic guys I’ve met. Kind of like Mr. Bohannon, my history teacher, in that he sounds and looks like a grandfather. A grandfather with much power, to be sure. We took some pictures but the colonel taking it with my camera pushed the wrong button, so I have to get it some other means.

I’ve been eating alone for dinner and lunch a lot lately. Sometimes I just can’t handle it so I decide to go buy some food to eat. It’s all fine and dandy if I do it once in a while. But with my work schedule, I can’t go on doing this every single day. My schedule is different from everyone else’s.

I went to the TMC the other day, the troop medical clinic or something of that sort. Basically, it’s a hospital. I had actually been there several times. Once for the original sick call when I felt I needed to do something about my jaw problems, and again to pick up that hard splint the doctor said he would make. He was at Camp Doha on my appointment time, and I never saw him for the next 2 attempts. I then came again and they told me the original doctor’s on leave, so I’m going to have to see Colonel Kim. Yeah, a Colonel. I was quite taken back, but I had known he had existed. My captain had run into him and told him to come by the post office to meet me. He was a peculiar fellow. At first he made a lot of jokes that I didn’t really understand, and I do believe he was trying to make a good impression on me, that although he was Korean, and I was Korean and both of us knew what that meant, he was trying to act cool about it. Later on, he cooled down, though. At first I didn’t like him all too much because I thought he was trying too hard to be someone he’s not. But when I saw through him after a few minutes, he was possibly the more interesting person I’ve ever met. We got to talking, about me being 19, why I joined the army, and that I’m a student at Berkeley back home. Then he says to me, Berkeley, huh? I graduated there in 1981. Something about Biology physics or some sort. Then he told me to take ethnic studies 130, because the same professor he had taken the class in is still teaching the class. I remember the guy’s face, but for some reason, I couldn’t remember his name, either. He had written a few books and I read one of them last year. Well, so we talked about what’s wrong with me. I have this thing called the TMJ where my right jaw clicks and locks itself. I asked him if what three other doctors have already told me is true, that I will have to live with it all my life. He said, well, if you do a surgery, it works pretty good, and they used to do that a while during the 80s, but the problem reoccured after about half a year. And what they’re trying to do with the hard splint is to get my jaws straightened out because one side is lower than the other and it’s not biting right. So it’s going to try and teach me to bite correctly, and hopefully that will ease the pain I’m feeling. But it will be like anything else in your body that goes wrong. Once it’s broken, it will never feel quite the same. So already, by the age of 18 as of last year, I have an injury that will haunt me for the rest of my life. No one knows what happened. It’s always the same questions, did you get hit on the face, fall down, anything? No, I just woke up one morning and it kept locking up by itself. But he was the only one so far that took a long time explaining things to me, and I felt real comfortable and lucky to be sitting there being treated by this man that could have easily been my father at 47 (he joined the army when he was 20, enlisted for 6 years reserves, active duty after direct commissioning for 21 years).

So, after 5 different attempts during a month’s length of time, I finally got a doctor that is more involved and always, or usually there. Before, the other doctor had given me naproxen and elavil. I had and still have no idea what they do, except he had said that naproxen tries to stop the pain before it happens and elavil helps you sleep comfortably. But when you wake up, you feel exhausted. And after a few days of taking that, I saw no immediate subtle results, so I stopped taking medication. This doctor gave me naproxen, but didn’t give me elavil. He told me that taking ibuprofen for too long gives you liver problems and too much naproxen gives you stomach ulcer, or something to that effect.

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