Stuck In A Temporal Void With All Our Lost Companions

Well here I am during the holidays. Most importantly I’m missing my two year wedding anniversary. The cherry on top of all of this which overshadows everything that I miss this month is that a good friend, Vincent Pomante, was taken from this world at the very beginning of this month. This time of year used to be kind of calm but as one of my good friends put it today, “We’ve stirred up the bee’s nest here.”

In 2003 I did more things that I have to live with the rest of my life then I have done here this time. However, this time around I haven’t been out on the front lines as much and have considered myself pretty lucky because of that. This is the worse place, Ramadi, which I’ve ever been to. I feel helpless every time I hear about one of my brother’s or sister’s falling in battle. This whole year will never happen in my mind. It’s hard to explain how it feels to step off the plane back home and suddenly it’s the day after you stepped on the plane to leave. Most of us feel like all that we do here is outside of time be it from our odd schedules to the seemingly uninterrupted, unchanging days and nights. We are so used to what little sleep we get that we are unable to keep track of the days. Changes in the weather help but really we are on one loooooonnnnnnggggg Groundhog Day. Go on watch that movie. I’ll wait……. Back so soon. Okay so that’s what it’s like only less homey feel and more misery. I think that how we deal with all the crap that we get to live through here is by chalking it up to one long never ending day. Then when we get home we feel like it’s only been a day since we left and we’re upset that our loved ones have changed. How can you change in one day right? Haha! Well after the first couple days we start to realize that we’ve missed so much and then a lot of us will try to “make up for lost time”. These poor fools will have survived over a years worth of hell only to kill themselves through alcohol poisoning or drunk driving or drug overdoses. Many will face prison for murdering the plethora of unfaithful wives and husbands out there who think that deployment=sexy time. Most of us will have a great reunion and be able to pick up right where we left off but the scars that we have from this rift in time are more then just physical injuries. We all have things that we’ll take with us to our graves. Things that family and friends will never understand and may actually feel disgust at the telling. It’s not their fault; they just have no perspective as to why we made certain decisions. Now being an avid sci-fi fan with such series as Star Trek, Star Trek The Next Generation, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Enterprise, Quantum Leap, Stargate SG1, Dr. Who, Red Dwarf, under my belt I feel like I’m an expert if not close to godlike in the field of temporal anomalies. Still I find the ease that the characters on above shows deal with traveling through time is strange. It’s not that easy of a thing to deal with when we get back to “the real world”. It may take months to get back on track or to feel like we’re back in control of our lives again. It’s not as easy as jumping through the Guardian of Forever killing someone you foolishly fell in love with in the thirties knowing full well you can never be with her and then coming back with your crazy doctor in tow. It’s just not that easy in real life. It’s odd to wrap one’s head around a feeling of timelessness. It gives us a culture shock when we find how different our spouses and family have become.

Then there’s the people who won’t come back with us. Our friends who were taken from our lives so abruptly that it’s almost hard to believe they are gone. My friend, Vincent, is one of those people. Vincent, like myself, was very interested in all things pirate and he had one day planned on having a ship that he would raid drug lord’s yachts in international waters with and turn in the drugs for a reward. Kind of like a Robin Hood of the high seas. I had done the research and found out that Brazil has no coast guard so we could pretty much do as we pleased in those water’s. It was a fun dream and we talked a lot about “Pirattitude” and how the freedom of the seas was where we wanted to someday end up. Both of us hail from Ohio and have a deep love for the state we grew up in. Vincent was a very funny man and there was always a joke or amusing story about Ohio on the tip of his tongue. He and I would swap stories about growing up in Ohio for hours on slow days while we smoked cigars or our tavern pipes (very piratical). Jokes flew around constantly. When the talk would turn serious it was always about the same thing. We always wanted our family and friends to understand what we are going through here. There’s just no way to explain it completely here with no frame of reference for the reader to have. We would discuss how the only way they could understand us is to be here with us but that was the last thing we ever wanted was for our loved ones to follow us through this hell. Then it would be back to laughs and jokes and stupid dances and singing silly songs. It was our three ring circus and it was always a funny show. Vincent lived everyday like it is an adventure and would live it as hard as he could to get all there is to get out of it. Though he was a soldier through and through he never let the Army destroy his wonderful individuality. He was a very real person and not just a face in the crowd. He touched many people’s lives including mine and he is greatly missed. I’m not as sad as I was when the pain was fresh. I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that I know that Vincent has beaten us all to his pirate ship and is sailing off into uncharted waters to find wondrous amounts of treasure. Every now and then I can see him looking back to the horizon he’s sailing away from, looking through his glass to see if there are sails in the distance following him. One day he’ll see those sails and it will be my ship. I’ll join his fleet and we’ll find that treasure together. I miss him a lot. Fair winds and calm seas for all of your voyage my friend.

I will see you all further down the road.

Mike