Part I 'Thoughts of Fear'

Sleep came easy in the prone position face down on the hard packed sand earth we were now attached to. We were laying in an arched semi-circle 10 meters or so out in front of the track. The other tracks of Golf Co. were spread out in an echelon to the right of us roughly 75 meters apart. Even though I could not see the rest of the Marines of Company G for the blackness, I knew that they were out there presumably resting just like we were. More time passed carrying us into the pitch black morning of our fourth day out. It was February 27, 1991 in Kuwait.

I do recall someone remarking how this was the darkest 1030hrs that they had ever seen. Little did we know that we were very close to our objective on the western edge of Kuwait City out there in the black distance. It was densely quiet at this spot except for the small chatter that occasionally broke the silence. My eyes never seemed to adjust because there was just no light anywhere and the oil smoke continued to roll like a horizon to horizon curtain not far above our heads. We ate some more MRE chow, watered up, checked weapons, smoked and talked to each other about what we thought was going to happen next.

As often occurred over the last nine weeks, my thoughts drifted to home. I guess by definition I technically did not have one but I felt certain that maybe it was time to get back to the States, get out of the suck and start my own. Surely that would have been more productive than the outcome of the present situation that I found myself in. It is amazing how interconnected those two opposing realities of ownership actually are. One without the other does not exist and from the perspective of each reality respectively it is difficult to make that attachment. It is almost as if the American culture is onto something with their own ownership rationalization to actually chose 'not' to think about it. While the person in the Military longs to have what those not in simply go to and from on the daily but never realizing that without their present role on the world stage none of the illusion of home ownership would be possible in the form it is now.

I had a few pictures of St. Lissa and my family that I pulled out of my small cammie notebook and I stared at them under the red light of my moon beam, olive drab issue, one each. My thoughts lingered, inspired by the movie screen on the inside front of my forehead skull playing color film based on memories of the past.

At this point I became a bit scared in the darkness. The next 24 hours were inevitable and I would surely face them with wide open eyes but the fear came in anyway. In this type of absence of light my mind gave in to consider all that was unknown before us. The eyes of my colleagues must have looked like mine did to them. Everyone was having similar thoughts about what it was going to be like to go through with this all the way to the end. No matter the outcome for at that point we had no idea with the real objective still ahead. We were actually conditioned to expect the worst even though up until just before this final operation within an operation we had not felt any fierce resistance.