A couple days ago at work, irritated by the sound of several conversations going on in the cubicle farm, I started scrolling through my music library, and rediscovered this album by Frou Frou. This particular album is one that I got from a friend in Iraq, and I listened to it on repeat for most of the last two months that I was in Baghdad.
Hearing the familiar songs starting up brought back, in one fell swoop, the emotional intensity of that experience… I am flabbergasted by how this works–I think that the only thing that would be slightly comparable is if you’d listened exhaustively to a song/CD through a breakup (or maybe the relationship that preceded the breakup), and then you returned to the song a long time later to find that it brought you back to that place in thoughts and emotions where you’d been as you listened to it.
Now I can remember why I lost my appetite for the last half of the time that I was there. It’s funny how I rewrapped all my layers of emotional insulation around me in the time since I got back. I’d been stripped pretty raw by the end of my time there, and I hadn’t realized how much I’ve recovered… Until I listened to this particular set of songs and realized exactly how comfortable and content I’ve been lately. (Which of course strikes me as being complacent and numb… But I think it’s really more conducive to productivity than the reverse.)
Is it weird, or masochistic, or disturbed, that this reminder just intensifies my desire to go back over? Even though I really hated a lot of the reality of being there, there was a sense of living authentically that I haven’t had at any other point in my life, and I truly miss it. (In nostalgic retrospect, of course…)
Everything you do, when you’re deployed, is centered around the mission. Even when you’re relaxing with friends, it’s because you’re all escaping the mission together for as long a time as you can… There is no compartmentalization in the deployed life. I guess I enjoy that kind of focus, that kind of narrow direction.It’s very different from everyday life at home, where your life is divided into personal time, work time, family time, friends time…
Interestingly, I think that maybe a lot of what I had to relearn when I got back home was how to unfocus my life again. How to diffuse my energy among multiple pursuits, and how to juggle things. I’m still worse at it than I was before I left on my deployment… I never bothered to revert from automatic electronic payments, and a stack of unopened mail will sit for a month or so on my kitchen counter, until I start losing house keys in it and get annoyed into cleaning it up… I guess the trouble of remembering all those little mundane tasks, and performing them, seems stupid to me now, because I’ve seen something different, a life where most of those are completely swept away, and life is pared down to bare essentials.
Well, how’s that for a completely introverted take on the experience of being at war? It’s funny–to me it doesn’t seem like I was actually doing military things, just a job… It occurred to me as I considered this upcoming long weekend — Veteran’s Day — that I suppose I’m a veteran now. (Or can you be that while you’re still active duty?) How odd!
Posted by Kjirstin 
