March 21, 2006
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The Soldier lives on dreams and never tires of reciting them. He yearns for sweetheart and home, yet returns to the front with joy and never narrates his time apart.
-Polemides, Tides of War
Well, I have my date to return to Italy. For some reason, it’s a 9 hour flight, so I can only guess that we’ll make a pass or to over Japan. It will be good to get away from Manas, which reminds me of the movie Groundhog Day, except that Bill Murray was lucky enough to kill himself in various ways.
I’m not saying that I’m happy that the deployment is coming to an end. On the contrary, if tomorrow they requested volunteers to go to Iraq or some other hellhole, I would gladly raise my hand, and only request time to obtain some of the items that I had sent home, and send them ahead of me. I have only two things that await me in Italy: my car and my apartment. Aside from this, there is nothing else that the place affords me over a combat zone. In fact, I make less money when I am home, and I have more bills and more bullshit that comes with being in garrison. I’m not greedy, and I wouldn’t do it soley for he money, but I just did the math on the shift of my net monetary assets, not including my investments, and adding in the debt of the Cadet Loan. Once I pull my SDP money, I’ll be up $23K from where I was a year ago, with no credit card debt.
…My friend employed me, at captain’s wages paid from his own purse, as a sort of private envoy to the Lacedaemonians, or those individual Spartans – Xenares, Endius, Mindarus – with whom he conspired to wreck the peace. I am no diplomat. I missed the action. I needed it.
One comes to the mercenary’s calling in this way, as a criminal to crime. For war and crime are twin spawn of the same misbegotten litter. Why else does the magistrate present is perennial offer to errant youth: servitude or the army. Each inducts into the other, war and crime, and the more criminal the felony, the deeper the criminal must plunge to reclaim himself, disremembering kin and country, forgetting even crime, so that in the end, the only riddle the soldier kens is that most occult of all: why am I still living?
……………….
You have observed the mercenary’s life, Jason. Of a year’s campaign there totals what, ten days of actual fighting? Boil it down to moments when one stands within hazard’s jaw and the tally condenses to minutes. All a man need do is survive that and he’s earned another season. Indeed the mercenary holds more in common with the foe, to preserve their lives and livelihoods, than with his on officers, seeking glory. What is glory to the soldier for hire? He prefers survival.
-Polemides, Tides of War
Black 6, out.
Comments (2)
you ever thought about workin for blackwater or something like them after you go sf? i hear they pay REAL well.
Cool. Well you know they have those security force civilians that work over there, mostly ex SF folks. I heard they seriously get PAID.