Reflections on the Lake

This is a journal of my time in Afghanistan, started a month after I arrived at Bagram Air Base in Parwan.

The photograph is looking west from outside my room.

Reflections on the Lake

The lake is drying up now–its really just a large area between two sets of housing units that becomes a gigantic muddy puddle when it rains. It was warm, bright, and still today–in the low 70s while the sun was up. The valley was covered in haze and smog, so the mountains came into focus as they rose out of the valley floor.

Today I was looking through my drawers and opened this really strange little stationary set that I picked up in the lobby of the Radisson in downtown Baltimore during the Yellow Ribbon Ceremony, when the Governor of Maryland said a few words of thanks to our unit before we deployed. I realized that I had, a little more than a decade ago, basically stopped writing–stopped keeping a journal, stopped writing letters, wrote a few more papers, and then left Boone with a degree in hand. I resolved to write four letters tomorrow morning, to home to Chrysta, Augusta, and Isabella, and to Beth, who I failed to write to a year ago when she asked me to write again. Then I decided to keep this journal.

At work today, I read a horrible report and kicked it back to the reporter to rewrite–I really am nothing more than an editor for the Army–only to see it again a few hours later, with as many problems as it had when first read. In between the two readings, I cataloged collection requirements–documents of questions that someone somewhere has and that someone else determined were worth tasking someone to go answer. I’m not sure that I understand the purpose of the cataloging exercise, except to assist soldiers who did not really enjoy writing and research in high school perform the bare minimum research just well enough so they don’t look like total idiots to voracious readers whose thesis papers are now Federal policy.