...The Third...

03 JULY 2010

My father and I had the boat out last summer, drifting down Boca Ciega Bay, and he was trying to teach me about a jib or a boom or some other nautical jargon for ropes and pulleys. My stepmother, bless her heart, was lounging on the deck and reading off some fun facts about reincarnation and other little ‘could-happens’ of the afterlife. I had been drinking, as usual, and had decided to ask her, “Do you know what I think happens when you die?” And, as she typically shows genuine interest in my opinion, she asked, “What’s that?” I said, “It’s a lot like laying in a hammock on a secluded beach…except, you’re not laying down, there’s no hammock and no beach.”

It’s not that I don’t necessarily believe in God, but if He is out there, I find it extremely unlikely that any of my prayers or sins would determine which corner of the ant farm He’d focus His magnifying glass. I believe the world is arbitrarily unfair, and that, if something, anything happens when you die, it will be a surprise. However, much like all ex-catholics—practicing ones too, I imagine—my suspicion of an omnipotent being grows exponentially when I feel scared or guilty or think that I may have mocked Him with just a little too much blasphemy.

This week’s guilt was over something silly I had said during a phone call home. In an attempt to calm my father’s worries regarding my proximity to danger, I told him, “It would take an act of God for them to get me.” It was bold, arrogant, naive and a very ‘me’ thing to say. It did nothing to ease my father’s mind; it was able to raise a distracting level of paranoia for fear of being smited by a super-being, who may or may not exist, let alone give a damn about my own existence.

This was hardly bothersome for me—it was just a tiny notation somewhere in my subconscious, waiting for the right chance to re-emerge back into a level of awareness—until the convoy brief the following day. The brief is a last minute check to ensure the trans unit and gun trucks are all on the same sheet of music: how many personnel and vehicles, the order of movement, route, significant activity on that route, what to do in the event of and so on. The brief is always immediately followed by a prayer—as if begging our imaginary friend for protection will somehow harden our armor more so than as designed by the manufacturer. I imagine our enemies do the same and that they pray for the same sort of success in battle. I do not find it ironic. It would be ironic if we knew God was real. I find it idiotic. I always walk away from these prayer circles and I hope there’s some Iraqi insurgent out there who walks away as well. I hope he’s out there doing this for love of country, rather than blind conformity to some false hope gathered from doctrine that holds no more validity than the Iliad or Beowulf or The Sirens of Titan or last week’s print of MAD magazine.

But, on this last mission, as I walked away from bowed heads and muttering pleas, I thought of my loose lips letting out God’s name the way I had the night before. Not that I feared a well-aimed lightening rod thrown my way. I feared that I had set-up the comic relief of reality for the perfect punch line—you prepare yourself for zig but then the world zags, and seemingly, it does so just because you didn’t expect it.

The mission had a number of curve balls, maintenance halts and poor radio connections and longer than normal pushes from one FOB to another. Each hiccup sparked a ‘tisk-tisk’ moment where I thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that?” But the second-guessing vanished soon enough, as each problem turned to an easy, or at least manageable, fix.

Actually, the one serious incident that laid in our laps the longest, didn’t have its turn at being considered irony’s revenge, it had to settle for a more self-involved concern for lost opportunity. The southern entrance to Taji, apparently, is not the correct entrance for convoys. This was the discovery made after two-thirds of our trucks had turned in, only to be re-routed out. This left my small group, along with the rear gun truck, alone on a major highway during the rush of mid-day traffic. After a half an hour of attempting to block traffic, the Iraqi motorists took to the streets. The people were walking all through our trucks and assembling in masses. It was a failed attempt on our part to herd a hundred stray cats, stray cats that posed more than the threat of rabies and painful abdominal injections. I didn’t think of my blasphemy or my tempting Murphy’s Law or the potential catalyst of one act of aggression turning a mob into a riot; I thought, “Too bad Nigel’s not here, that’d make some great day photos.”

It wasn’t long after the mob had risen that we began to push forward to the next gate. And that no seas boiled or locust thickened the air, I again felt comfortable in doing and saying as I please in matters related to the unseen puppet master, the man behind the curtain. On that final leg, when sleep was getting the better of us, and the cargo drivers began to tire off and sway their trucks, I managed to blow one final raspberry at the man upstairs. Pulling along side one of the haulers, I flipped on my loud-speaker and forewarned the nodding head at the wheel, “I am the voice of God, awake my son, and drive.”

- The Exodus