Where is my Journal?

I.

Where is my Journal?

Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Julius Caesar Act 3, scene 1

I spent Thursday evening angry.  I went through boxes and boxes of my things.  It has been more than a decade since I picked up a rifle more than two since I left school and yet all station of permanence lived in these boxes.  And I could not find what I was looking for.  I kept a journal and a historian by training, I like to write from the real record and not conjure something from scratch.  A bottle beer fell onto the floor.  I spent that Thursday evening angry.
  
Angry because I was tired, I had a lot of work to do afterward, this simple task like everything else in my life that was supposed to take 15 minutes has now taken 3 hours.  Angry, because here these boxes shame me for my transience and ghosts garnished with a neglect that would make Miss Havisham blush.  Angry, at memories of silent explosions, the flapping of a real life invisible fire breathing dragon, the aperture between this world and the next where hell swallowed men whole and the sight of dead men stacked like cord wood - ugly children that men would mourn for a while and then go about their day and days like they never existed - only the dead have seen the end of war.  "Where was my journal?  I just saw it!!!"   

No I never found my journal.  But it does not matter even if I found it, I would not begin my tale there.  I would begin it here, in the love nest that Amy built, the 2 bedroom apartment not far from her parents on Tremont Street.  We spent those hours those last hours the way we did every night when we were married - making love.   I remember her.  The apex of our time together could be summed up in this image not as she was but as I remember her, nude in hues of gold and alabaster, her well formed body taunt and young would make Queen Venus cry, a single tear rolled off her blue eyes and streaked across her face like a falling angel.  I loved her and she loved me.  She was sad to see me go and afraid that I might die.  I had to report in a couple of hours.

We went to war on a 747 on an airline that does not exist anymore and maybe it never existed - one of Mr. Cheney's industries.  I know that I am supposed to hate all things Bush-Cheney, person, place or thing.  But if you have ever had to depend on things and people and at most your life and at the least your creature comfort depended on it and you got more than you asked for, then those insinuators can kiss my fat ass because Cheney's people treated us good and we generally got the best.  And when it is your life or buddy's life, you don't give a damn what it costs.

Between ambiens, we flew to Bangor, Maine, had a draught of Guinness in Shannon, Ireland though subsequent trade winds blew through Ramstein and Rhoda.  It was the first time I flew commercial with semiautomatic rifle on lap.  The stewardesses were nice.   Where we landed the next morning intrigued us strangers in a strange land.  An overcast day in March greeted us. Brisk and green, winter lingered but made its slow retreat.  Andy, the guy that was in charge of all of us bellowed, "We are in Romania!"

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mihail_Kogalniceanu_Air_Base

Mihail Kogălniceanu - to be exact, Mihail Kogălniceanu International Airport provides air access to the Romanian Riviera, Constanta.  Mihail Kogălniceanu reached capacity in 1979.  Austrian Airlines, Air Berlin
Condor, Luxair and Ryanair still fly there seasonly as I would later learn but the morning the green horde arrived, the place was a ghost town, clean, manicured in a post AMC-Mad Men sort of way, but quiet.  

"We had to go through customs," Andy told us.  

"Customs?  Really?"  I thought, we had enough guns and ammunition to invade the city and hold the airport indefinitely yet we had to go through customs.  Each one of us filed past a one person both, typed a few keystrokes into a 386 PC and had our passports stamped by a Soviet Style bureaucrat straight out of central casting.  I tried to make heads or tails out of the letters on the wall written in a Latin script in a language that was one part Slavonic and one part Romance.  Having studied both Romance and Slavonic languages as a college boy, I understood none of us.  I noticed that the bureaucrat made no attempt to collect or record our identities more easily presentable on our military IDs.  Then again, perhaps I have said too much.

Andy told us that we could not write, take pictures or tell anyone where we were.  This was 2003.  Not everyone had a laptop.  No one heard of wifi and though the internet and the telephone was very much on our minds we needed the permission of men like Andy who could set that up for us.  For now, it was load up in buses and try not to attract attention to yourself.  We were wearing rather obvious green uniforms that looked like, but perhaps we were all huntsmen all 600 of us.  Still with even all this, at the age of 29, I couldn't help but feel like James Bond and thinking, "This was pretty cool."

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