Blue Collar Ballad

In one day I have managed to make it to every major city in Afghanistan. What was supposed to be a short, hour-long flight to FOB Salerno ended up taking over 12 hours. Here’s the story:

We are awoken just after midnight and are abruptly told that we have an hour to pack our things and get all our bags on to the plane. Once we got this done, we sat in a holding area for about five hours waiting for our flight, luckily watching the Packers-Eagles play-off game. At 6am we get on the plane, it was one of those big C-130 aircrafts with no interior just a bunch of wires and tubes running all over the place, and the mesh seats that feel like sitting on a hammock made of internet cable (think Operation Dumbo Drop…just without Danny glover). As we sit down there are four of five people sitting around a Lt. Colonel who apparently NEEDS to use our flight to Salerno to get to Kabul. Kabul is in the opposite direction of Salerno by two hours, but the Air Force pilot justifies the trip with the cliché “Orders are Orders”. After an hour of waiting in Kabul and just missing the opening of the airport’s coffee shop (the only source of food we’ve seen in 8 hours) we are rushed back onto our plane, only to wait for 35 minutes because this time a General and his posse who need a ride to Kandahar. This HAS to happen before we can be dropped off.

[Up to this point the delays due to military shenanigans have been bearable. Bad scheduling? got it. Hurry up and wait? No problem. No food, poor communication, and tons of heavy lifting? Too easy! And definitely all too common to get upset about. Moreover, I am in no hurry to get closer and closer to the far corner of the world we are going to spend the next year in, we could have flown to Euro Disney and back for all I care. But the last leg of this flight became infuriating.]

The General and the 15 people that build his entourage step on the plane and all of a sudden the bureaucracy in the air is suffocating. These old white men, who are obviously of the same stock as those who got our country into this mess in the first place, mock us simply with their presence. The overstated juxtaposition is almost too much to handle. My dirty hands, cut and scraped lay hanging and tired over my weapon while theirs, lotioned and pampered with nails trimmed and clean, sit folded in lap or fiddling with expensive electronics. My short hair, unwillingly shaved to skull glares at the shampooed and gelled locks of these men and women in button down shirts and warm jackets.

One man who sits down across from me looks to be about 50. He avoids eye contact as he brushes past my legs in the cramped space we now share; I’m basically hugging my rifle at this point for him to move past. As he settles into his uncomfortable seat, confusedly fumbling around with seat belt he makes what I can only assume is a bad joke to his look-a-like friend next to him. Un-ironically "Blue Collar Balad" by The Sweatshop Union comes on my ipod. Somehow, he finds the audacity to ask me to take a picture of him and a few of his cronies. Now, he’s probably a very nice guy, yet I can’t stand him at all, almost everything he does offends me. It isn’t just the clothes he sits in, the khaki pants and black polo I’m not allowed to wear, or his clean and brushed teeth that he shows with a wide eyed coffee grin tells me he had a great nights sleep in some hotel last night complete with a complimentary continental breakfast. But more than these jealousies it is the insensitivity to what he has and I do not that cause me to resent this man and the picture he wants me to snap. Because once I focus, flash, and hand the camera back he can’t look me in the eye for the rest of the flight (Hell, he didn’t even say thank you).

The whole flight was a perfect depiction, a snapped picture, reminding me of how the higher ups, the civilian contractors and the “diplomatic officials” get paid five times more than I do every month, but it’s my vest that holds the kevlar plates, not theirs. It’s my life that is "expendable", while theirs can hold up and reroute airplanes and will do it without apologizing. It is belittling, dehumanizing, angering and disrespectful.

And I understand harboring these resentments and offended judgments won’t do me or anyone else any good. And honestly, I understand how the rank structure works, I even appreciate the necessity of hierarchy and that these people probably carry incredible responsibilities on their shoulders. But the blatant disregard for a struggle they do not share is upsetting and insulting. And fundamentally, this is the biggest issue I have with Army life. Because it isn’t just Generals and contractors that enrage me but anyone who looks out from behind their rank and sees those beneath them as less than, insignificant, or unworthy. This attitude is embedded into just about every facet of the military and it makes my blood boil and words my mother did not teach me fly out of my mouth.

In any case we eventually landed at our destination, the Air Force guys were pretty good humored about the whole thing, and we got a chance to eat ourselves into a coma.