7.3mi simulated, 60:05, 18 JAN 09, Bagram, Afghanistan

Day 341 of the campaign.

iThink: 10,000 Maniacs, "Every Day Is Like Sunday"

WX at 0030: 28 (-2) DP 26 (-3) BP 30.12 (1020) WNW 5 snow RH 92

Odometer 4: 66.1mi

Z3.
Average/max heart rate = 155

I learned my lesson from the last time and if I was going to endure incredible boredom on the elliptical whilst burning lard, I was going to catch up on some of the reading I'd been meaning to do while here.

The book I was reading was Michael Hodges' A Doctor Looks at War, an account of a cardiologist who was assigned to Fort Bragg, and deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. My parents bought this book for me, as I'd spent some seven years at Fort Bragg, but I should've guessed that there'd be a persistent element of religion. I'll burn through the book as it's a pretty fast read (I was about 175 pages through from the start when the hour timer went off) but people address things in different ways.

I realize this because as I go through this tour, and realize some of the more pervasive dark sides of my personality, that I don't embrace any kind of religion at all. I realize this because the nature of my work has led me down a repudiation of human nature in a great many ways.

There are some true professionals with whom I am honored to work. There are some others who I think are complete and utter shitbags and are merely exchanging food products and oxygen at varying rates. I'm still of the belief that working with the latter is part of the price I pay for the privilege of working with the former. The price of that is that most of the former will be crushed flat and scraped off the floor with a putty knife by the end of the tour.

We lost two soldiers today, one in a helicopter crash and the other in a suicide vehicle-borne IED bombing, and there are others who are maimed for life. I think of those and other troops we've lost, in light of what I know to be a fairly well-developed sense of revenge. I realize lately that it would take scant motivation for me to kill, up close, which may not be a good leading indicator of ethics and morality as I start approaching the last quarter of my tour.

There are a few people who have warned me that all this hate is going to burn me up. There is a part of me that doesn't really care, because that's the part of me that is going to do whatever it takes, straight up to the bitter end. There's another part of me that wonders what I have to do in order to let it go because I probably won't be a very functional member of society if I want to kill a statistically significant number of people I see that I patently don't respect.

No splits.