More of the same...

Hello from Baghdad, where today it was 114 degrees, and man did it feel like it. Whew. I was out doing my thing and decided to take some more pictures. By the time I got back to the office it was after 1:00 pm and I was just totally smoked. My PT suffered tonight as a result. It was hard to get motivated and I reached muscle failure pretty early.

My PT has been a good news/ bad news story. I am building muscle, but I'm not burning fat quickly enough. I weighed myself tonight and I'm 185 lbs. My goal at the start of this deployment was to get down to 169. I'm definitely going in the wrong direction, but that's not hard to do here. The amount of food they serve here is just out of control. You have to tell them to slow down on what they dump on your plate or before you know it you're working a 4,000-calorie diet each day. I took a "before" picture a couple of weeks ago; if I hit my target I'll post them side by side so people can see the difference. If I don't hit my target weight, all photos will get quietly and permanently deleted...

So one of my last posts dealt with chickenhawks. They are a subspecies of that most disgusting of contemporary animals, the Cowardlius Republicanus. Well. I have an acquaintance, a guy I'll call "Cheryl," who is the poster child for this kind of animal.

Wait--I know what you're thinking..."Pat, you said that this is a dude but he's got a chick's name. What's going on?"

Very observant. This person was born male, but only grew to be half a man, hence the chick's name. It's not "his" real name anyway. She knows who she is. Anyway, I'm digressing...back to the story.

So I'm here, in a war zone, where soldiers aren't shooting at paper targets so they can feel good about themselves, they're shooting at bad guys (who are shooting back, by the way) in order to save their ass. This chick thinks it's funny to quote Democrats who were equally gutless and didn't fight to keep the president from invading this country four years ago. You know what I mean--the ones who said junk like, "Saddam Hussein, bad bad man, needs to be removed from power, etc.," mostly during the year prior to the invasion. Oddly, she never mentions the times Bush and Cheney expound at length about why invading Iraq and destroying the Hussein government is such a bad idea. She gets selective amnesia about how Bush and his cohorts, seven short years ago, would sneer at the idea of nation-building (exactly what we're doing right here, right now). But hey, that's to be expected. Nation-building sucks; nation-building when Kellog, Brown, and Root (KBR) is performing the work under non-competitive contracts--buddy, that's called a retirement account when you leave office.

Damn it, I'm digressing again. Anyway, "Cheryl" is sending these silly f***ing e-mails, just peppering my inbox with 'em. I'm like, screw it, she'll get bored and start playing with dolls--sorry, poseable action figures--again anytime now. I go work out, go hit the showers, and go to bed. That was Tuesday night. So I'm sitting here in my office yesterday afternoon, about to go to chow, and she starts sending them AGAIN! I'm like, Jesus Christ, is this chick stalking me? Like, I'm done with this whole business, I actually have a war going on here that sort of has my attention, and this woman is still going at it. She wouldn't serve when it was her chance--in Vietnam, where lots of women served--but she'll put on the cheerleader's outfit, wave the pom-poms, and enthusiastically send other people's kids off to war. She just wouldn't let it go.

Well, yesterday was the wrong day for that kind of junk; we had incoming here that was a little unnerving, and 14 soldiers died in a helicopter crash in the hills up north. 14 soldiers who had hopes and dreams to go back to after the Army. 14 people who had families that were worried every minute they were here, and friends, and all of them now are beside themselves with grief that this chick "Cheryl" will never, ever know. And she just keeps sending this garbage. Not only is it immature for a woman approaching retirement age to do something like that, it's just downright disrespectful. So I told her to show some respect for the dead and knock it off. Tell me--what do you think was the response? Was it (a) silence, or was it (b) more verbal diarrhea? If you selected (b) give yourself a chuck on the shoulder and a 20 oz. bottle of red Gatorade from the Dining Facility (the DFAC, pronounced "dee-fack").

I was just enraged. It definitely motivated me for my workout after dinner (think Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear"). You know, it must really suck to be like "Cheryl." I mean, having to go through life, masquerading as the tough girl when the seminal event of her generation is a war; you know, the time when someone who wants to play the tough girl can actually play the tough girl, and she passes it up. Okay, fine--so she chose to Park in College for a few years until things cooled off; whatever, lots of other people did the same thing. They just didn't come out of the experience with such an abundance of self-loathing that they decided the only way to feel better about avoiding the war was to cheer for other wars to start so that they could act tough with their friends. Again, it must suck to carry that kind of shame. But I wouldn't know--my country called and I answered. The person calling the shots this time happens to be a dangerously ignorant, semi-retarded chickenhawk like "Cheryl," but I think that's why she loves the guy so much. They were cut from the same bolt of cloth.

It's the same kind of cloth used for diapers.

But am I bitter? Nah...why be bitter?

I'll be blogging at you later, so stay tuned...lots of interesting things go on here every day, and I'll be back to tell you about 'em. Thanks for reading.