Knee Deep in the Hooah!

Several months back a regular reader sent me a link to this blog (thank you again KYWoman!). I had not been to the blog for a little while, and when I stopped by there tonight I read this soldier’s entry about his final ride out of Afghanistan. It is very poignant, educational, articulate and to be honest, quite poetic. Here’s a small excerpt of what you will read if you stop by and Bill and Bob’s Excellent Afghan Adventure. Oh, and welcome home Bob (I hope that is correct.) Thank you for your service, and we are waiting to hear of your safe arrival back on American soil!

Excerpt:

There were a lot of other sights that I said goodbye to easily; the mud brick Afghan construction, burqa-clad women moving like blue trick-or-treaters down the side of the street, haphazard electrical wires strung on flimsy poles running between houses like a drunken spider web. I won’t miss the general shabbiness, the vague feeling of quiet desperation, the feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems; the destruction.

I am glad to be an American. We don’t know what we’ve really got; we take it for granted. Overseas, our flag is a symbol of so much. It stands for things that citizens of other countries resent us for in a lot of ways, but they envy us, too.

Sometimes we are proud of the wrong things; we don’t even know the preciousness of what we have. We are so lost in ourselves that we misidentify our real strengths; but they are there.

One thing that we take for granted is the intactness of our seemingly fractal society. Our infrastructure, which we sometimes become exasperated with, is so intact. Infrastructure; roads, bridges, electricity, water, sewage, garbage collection… it’s so fragile. It’s the stuff that takes years to build and lots of time to maintain, and it’s the first thing to get blown to pieces when significant groups of people fight with each other over control of a society.