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| The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up. Matthew 4:16 |
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Dear 339th MP Co, It was five years ago today (March 9, 2004) that our convoy from Kuwait rolled into Ashraf. Prepared for war, we had to settle rather for a dead-end in the action, where mere human interaction provided another kind of conflict. "Zud bosch!" (hurry up) in the showers. Riots. More Tea. New Shoes, please. This MRE No good. Watching the bunkers blow up paid us back for the boredom. Nights of bats and morale-fires brought us to the stone age. Ancient Babylon, with its cursed, parched land, sun-scorched oven wind by day, and goat-dung-fed farmers' hearthfires fouling the air morning and evening, added us to its list of inhabitants. Ten months later I went back to Iraq, though never in the many roads I got to travel that second tour did they include a return stop at Ashraf. There seemed to be an interest among some there to keep trying to kill us, but God's will was, for whatever divine purpose, that none of our small convoy team would get killed. Yet the real drama, whether you appreciate it or not, lay not in the war, but in Ashraf and the nightmarescape road we took to get there. Crossing the last checkpoint from Kuwait to Ashraf put everyone's hair on edge. Every minute on those weird roads in Iraq seemed bathed in primitively lethal darkness that allowed nothing to be normal or innocent. Modern highways one stretch, then a measureless dry sea of dusty white wasteland the next stretch-- where did the Iraqis on foot out there fit in? They were walking along our "road", but where to? Nothing for miles. When we did see houses, there were green, red and/or black banners atop every roof... proclaiming what? Triumph of human spirit? Death to the invaders? Then the rotten milk stink of the south Baghdad landfill-- with huts erected by those doomed to loiter its contours mining food. Children too. Don't know what shocked more, the sights or the smell. The only thing we got deprived of seeing in this Halloween-in-March were the Bad Guys. Stray thought...on the bus ride back to McCoy from Volt Field, WI (at the end of final tour) I looked at every mailbox we passed and thought, "there is no bomb in that mailbox, I know this for a fact... because God has blessed us with a home country without a large chunk of PSYCHOS." People at airports often thanked me for serving. In all appreciation I would thank THEM for "populating a country with SANE people". Yet not every Iraqi is a murderer. Travel anywhere and you will see, people for the most part want the same things. To live without restraints. Add to a barren hinter-world like Iraq the depravity of Saddam's loyalists, add the psycho-mindwashing and enslavement of the PMOI, and add to that the necessity for us to erect triple strand between the defectors and their future, and humanitarian as we all tried our hardest to be, you can see the grand insufferability of it all. The cursed land of Iraq; the permanent psychosis of Ashraf. How could this not have touched SPC Omvig who took his life after returning. Yet God in His mercy spared us all to return home. May He spare you in His mercy two years and two months from now (see links at bottom). Thank you for serving, for keeping us all alive, and for preserving the lives and spirits of the detainees under harsh extremes of heat and patience... showing Iraqis and Iranians that they really were lied to about us being not-human. Maybe we learned the same from them.
May God bless,
God commands us to depart the churches
The rapture: May 21, 2011 / The end of the world: October 21, 2011
http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/may21/index.html
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| � 2005 John O'Leary |