The Greatest Christmas (Part I)

3-part story. I hope you not only enjoy, but understand the true meaning.

-JL4

The was a time.

A time that is growing farther and farther out from the current year, causing the memories to fade faster as each passing moment becomes another blur in an ever-expanding landscape of worrying about school, paying the mortgage, and wondering how come I have to lean over to gaze at my Nike's.

It had become cold in recent weeks, the omnipresent heat of August, September, and October finally acquiescing to the rotation of the globe. No one could fully understand how the desert could be so damn cold after being so oppressively hot those first three months. We had trained and trained and trained. Each day the same thing, but there was a certain satisfaction in knowing each time we did our thing, we became better at it. As the last week in December approached, I started to realize that I was part of something very special...a group of people, 40 in total, who knew how to do their jobs in an incredibly expert way under the absolute worst conditions possible. To this day, I've never been around a more competent gathering - before or since.

Why shouldn't we have been good? It was all we did; all we had to live for at the time. 1990 in the Saudi Arabian desert was not someplace you could just pack up your things and walk away because you wanted to quit. There was nowhere to go, no one you could complain to. The 100% sentiment was we must practice - again and again - if we wanted to go home in one piece on our own feet. But now the training was over. The time had grown short, and we knew from the newscasts that we all listened to on our battery powered radios there was no stopping the machine now. It didn't really matter whether you agreed or not. In a strange twist, you now knew what the previous generations meant when they told you "There is no right or wrong when you're in a fox hole. There is only what is happening a that moment." We were all a part of the same bond shared by our predecessors, both professional and draftee. We had our link to history, and we knew history was not going to be denied.

I, being one of the higher ranking in our unit, arranged for myself and two others to go on a "road trip" down to the nearest village. Understand now, the nearest village was about 40 miles away, that being 40 miles of the same unyielding landscape of gently rolling sand dunes set against a backdrop of the furthest horizon you could ever even imagine, let alone see. "Nothingness" doesn't even scratch the surface of where we were. We were a thousand miles from nothingness, which might help put it into perspective for you. No TJ Max or Wendy's down this road, which wasn't even a road per se...just a trail carved and then daily re-carved by the endless caravan of brown and tan vehicles making their way north for the eventual...well, for the eventuality might be a better word. The road had to be recarved each day because the night winds would come in, shifting the fragile sands around, and each morning was like a new snowfall in Minnesota - fresh, solitary, a complete rebirth of the landscape. If we were to move for a day or so, when we returned the only lingering landmarks would be our tentage. Without them, we would have never been able to return to the same place. Every morning, each square foot looked exactly like any and every other square foot, something that was incomprehensible until we all first saw it with our own eyes. We all knew once we left where we had been for the last 3 months, within 24 hours there wouldn't be a single reference point, mark, or detail which would mark our physical place in history, an irony not lost on soldiers that knew some of the history of the way returning soldiers have at times been treated in our country.

While I drove the hummer to the village my passengers were dutifully manning their machine guns just in case someone up the road decided to get frisky with us. I allowed myself the privilege for the first time of thinking of those I loved back home. It was Christmas after all, and I'm sure they were somewhere thinking of me. I kind of lost myself for a few minutes, and for the first time in months dropped my guard. It was a nice relief, something I found myself fighting to stop because I knew I had to get back to the present eventually. Back at the encampment, the soldiers were carrying out the orders I had given them for the preparations which would tie into our trip. There was never a doubt they would carry these orders out, and I knew they would carry them out beyond my expectations. They always did, especially these past few months.