On a Dime

A little over a week ago I was contemplating a post discussing how frighteningly mundane life is. I didn't expect complacency to nestle into our happy home so comfortably, so soon. I was in the shower, where much of my best thinking is done (note to self: take longer showers), and I realized that nothing had changed since my brother went off to Iraq. We see Andrew so infrequently throughout the year that standing in the shower, gelling up with Prell, it felt like things were as they had always been. Andrew off in Georgia, or New York, or Hawaii. The family at home.

Well, things changed quickly with two e-mails. In the first, my brother documented the mortar attack that welcomed him to Iraq. They quickly fled from their plane to a bunker, but not before my brother made note of the bullet strikes alongside the AC-130 that dropped them into the war. As horrifying as this could have been -- the first attempts on my brother's life -- Andrew coloured the experience with a jocular bemusement that distanced us (and probably himself) from it.

But no amount of tongue-in-cheek could dispell the horror that befell my family with Andrew's next e-mail. His first mission in Iraq started as a retrieval of a High Value Target and ended up as a complete ambush of US and Iraqi forces. Despite the absense of any US casualties, the Iraqi forces were decimated. The bodies were piled into the back of a pickup truck and dumped in front of the aid station, where my brother spent the rest of his day doing blood transfusions, and IVs, as well as stitching up the wounded. As my brother put it "I must have aged 25 years in a matter of 25 minutes."

Our house has been crippled ever since that e-mail. At the tail end of it, my brother promised to call that evening or the next day, so my mother has hunkered down in the living room with her quilts for the past two days (Andrew's deadline has since expired), occasionally taking breaks to knock out a game of sudoku online. In a wonderful twist of the knife, we received an inordinate number of telemarketing calls -- a few even asking for Andrew. It's a special kind of heartache when it comes courtesy of Spanky McG.E.D. from Sprint.

I empathize with what my brother is going through. This house is similarly on edge, but instead of mortars and gunfire we have doorbells and telephones. The night after we got the ambush e-mail, I had trouble sleeping. It was nothing special, just one of those nights. Somewhere around one o'clock in the morning, as I finally started to make headway on dreamland, I heard a car door slam outside. My eyes flew open, and I lay completely still in my bed, waiting... waiting... for that ring. After a minute or so I got up and headed inconspicuously to the kitchen, telling my mother I was merely getting a glass of water. In truth, I was going to make sure there wasn't a car parked in front of our house. There wasn't, but I could still hear the doorbell waiting as I walked back to my bedroom.

The next day a friend of Andrew's came to visit my mother. She knocked. Nobody ever knocks at my house, so my anxiety immediately hit 10. When I got to the door I saw a car on the street, one I didn't recognize. It all added up to "not good." I was awfully friendly to Brandi when she walked in the door. I don't know if I've shared more than one or two words with her in my life, but I was schoolgirl chatty when I welcomed her inside. She must have thought I was nuts, but really I was just thankful she wasn't wearing green.

The mood has changed, and I didn't expect it to be so swift. I thought my brother would have time to get comfortable, as we got comfortable, in war. But we dove in headfirst, and we're already choking on the saltwater.

I've called my brother's deployment The Longest Year. Well, The Longest Year just got a lot longer.