A Block of the Burden and the Heat of the Day

I must bear the burden and the heat of the day and the burden is literally heavy and the heat is biblical.  Both are old testament.  ACU, including helmet, vest, plates and then the weapons and the ammunition add up to nearly 70 lbs to bear in the Babylonian heat of the day.  I am in modern-day Hillah, outside Baghdad, on the lower Euphrates.  I am heavy with burden and heat.  I feel like doing something drastic like, say, smoke in a mosque or wink at a schoolgirl or recite poetry while issuing a FRAGO:  Our operation order is to penetrate the demarcation between the bazaar at phaseline Amanda and remove all hostile elements that will likely take shape without form, shade without color and will likely represent themselves as a paralyzed force and make a gesture without motion.  So maintain your zeros and keep a body count.  We want a clean casualty report.  Hooah.  I remove my pack of smokes, extract a cig and put the pack down.  It’s touched and I smack the toucher’s hand, “Keep your dick beaters off of my smokes.”  Someone asks me “Hey, daddy, if you get popped can I have your boots?”  and I proselytize “You’ll get my boots in your balls.”  If this happens the one with the booted balls will take it like a man and recover because he’s graffitied his head gear with the declaration that he yea, though he walks through the Valley of the Shadow of Death he shall Fear No Evil cause he’s the Meanest Motherfucker in the Valley.  I wonder where he got the Sharpie and when he started to write so small.  Our SAW gunner’s burden is heavier than the rest of ours because his weapon is 17 lbs unloaded and this increases to 22 with his 200 round belt and plastic ammo box.  We’re Cavalry and a SAW gunner is traditionally an infantry role.  But this war has everyone warring like infantry.  The heat is an infantry unto itself.  We stand still.  Burdened and reluctant yet willing and eager at the same time.  We have to move off before the kiddies start surrounding and hounding us for souvenirs.  They dress like professional refugees.  All their clothes come from charities.  A shit ton of them wear t-shirts advertizing the losing team of one Super Bowl or another.  No one knows who’s going to win so shirts are produced for both teams and the losing one’s shirts go to charities to clothe children who don’t even know that the game exists.  The boys crown in close.  The girls stand off shyly and eager.  They want to approach or want to be approached by the big strong American all decked out in his heaviness in the heat, bearing the day in all of it.  We have been told not to touch females.  Zero females.  Of any age.  For any reason.  Older females approach, bend, come to their knees and leave a flower at our booted burdened heated feet like a request:  please don’t rape me.  We have been told that the females have been told that we are violent and have come to kill their men and rape them and their daughters.  The sun is hit harder and shines slimmer here.  Weird.  And the sand is stubbornly sifted.  No number of booted feet under no amount of burden or strength of heat can thicken me into surrender.  Somewhere some desert-burdened nonhuman animal makes its God-throated sound and we wonder for a blink of time if we’ve been infiltrated.  Forcefully distracted.  From an ambush.  No.  We must move.  Move and bear the burden of the heat and the day.  A kid is chasing us for candy.  I want to do something drastic in the heat with my burden during the day like, say, scare the kid away with loud English or carry a little girl on my shoulders - she won’t make any difference to the weight already carried - or bust my way into a family’s home and force them to give me tea.  All in the bearing of the burden of the heat and the day.

*Italicized poetry by T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Title taken from Matthew 20:12