Still recovering a bit from an air assault two days ago.  For my first bona fide combat operation in a year, I picked a fucking dandy.  Jumping from helicopters in pitch darkness into booby trapped irrigation canals, wading silently in teams of four into the city, 4 miles away with night vision goggles (no depth perception) carrying 80 pounds of combat readiness on my back.  My back, which is in complete and utter shock.  At least after all that we managed to sneak up on four of the ten men we were trying to get, and arrested each without any insane violence.  One of them was still asleep when his bedroom door disintegrated.  After that, not so much.

But my young trooper on her first bona fide combat operation ever, did great, and is positively glowing with this sense of achievement that I realize flickered out in me somewhere in 2005.  All I see is the absurdity, the futility and folly.  While the four big arrests were a rousing success by any standard, the operation also involved herding every single male resident of eight city blocks into a field at 4am to check their IDs against an essentially worthless blacklist.  Basically, if someone makes a sworn statement against you, you’re on the blacklist and you get arrested by Iraqi soldiers when they sweep through every few weeks.  Generally people make sworn statements against people whose stuff they want to steal.  It’s a lousy, stupid system.  Something like 15 of them got carted off to an extremely unpleasant facility downtown.

forgive me for bitching.  the shitwater canals are like the desert and the swamp rolled into one.  when we left, watching the perfectly synchronized helicopters glide down to us in front of a fat moon, bats wheeling overhead and flames licking the horizon, birds singing in the rushes - it was beautiful like i haven’t seen in so, so long.  it was amazing.  my eyes were like dinner plates, taking it all in despite the rotor wash mercilessly blasting us with chunks of red mud.  what a night, by any standard.