Pensamientos

Paul e-mailed a photo taken through night-vision goggles of last night's raid in Iraq's Sunni Triangle. The photo is a surreal shot of him and a new trainee-arrival that he's indoctrinating for troop replacement. The green glow surrounding them is the same glow that I saw on Fox News from the embedded Photographers videos during the initial days of the war. It's very eerie and ominous. Paul told me last week that his new patrol duty was safe. Today he described a helluva firefight in which many iraqi insurgents were killed and three were captured. He said no American GIs were injured. "I told you it was safe Dad!" How comforting!! This war is much different from that of my Vietnam days. It's very weird to talk to a soldier online a couple of hours after he has returned from battle. We don't talk much about the firefights. This is partly because of security and mostly because my soldier-son wants to escape emotionally for a time. While we were chatting online, Paul was surfing for deals on a trip to Disneyland as a surprise for his wife and daughters when he returns in April. Also, we were chatting about photography and computers while he was forwarding photos to me from his flash drive. It was more of a business-as-usual kind of conversation than one from a war zone fraught with danger. This certainly highlights how compressed and instantaneous communication has become today. I'm uncertain how this affects human beings pyschologically and in a time sense. I remember reading Alvin Toeffler's "Future Shock" many years ago and thinking about time compression. I must go back and re-read the book. I'll be very happy when Paul returns from Iraq. It's tougher being a parent of a soldier in a war zone than it is being a soldier in a war zone. I would prefer to be in the midst of battle myself than to send any of my children to war. I pray constantly these days.