The Fog of Home

"Originally published by the New York Times on March 12th, 2006

The other morning I walked out of my hooch and saw antennae standing watch like silent sentinels, sticking their heads up out of the fog. The sun looked like a silver coin through the haze. You could stare right at it. The horizon was shrouded. I heard a large explosion, but the sound was compressed as if in a vacuum; it was hard to tell if it was an I.E.D. on a road just outside the F.O.B. or a mortar attack inside the wire. By mid-morning, the clouds served as a prism and there was a golden glare all over the world. It wasn’t the kind of gold you might imagine while reading a poem by Robert Frost. It was the fallow brown of a vast desert come to steal away the mirage of safety."
Wordsmith at War