inside

all my life ive waited to see you again
and all my life i looked into the sky to react.

Gave you everything that I ever was -
when I found that wasnt enough,
I tried to find what you needed.

inside of me,
I found a stranger within,
a stranger that knows me too well,
inside of me,
I found my own hell,
that I will try to erase (for the rest of my life)

Music plays again and again -
notes I think I heard once before.
Sounds like a memory playing itself out...for the last time before us.

Inside of me,
I wonder if Ill return,
or is this the man I will be for the rest of my days.
a stranger to me,
a stranger to you,
Lets just sit and pretend it will all come to change.
Inside of me, I found my own hell,
one I knew I created, a hell I can stand, I know its only me,
as I fall even further again.

waited for you to react - to know if love was forever.
inside of me I can say it all again,
know this was for you -
I would write my life again and sing a new song,
if that could mean - I would know you again.

(I just want to know you again - see inside you once more, and know the colors that you paint
with, to know you again.)

Inside of me, was this all to pretend,
that I could ever know hapiness again?
Ill never forget - the world I once knew,
how could I forget, you wrote it on my soul.

-
2:08 AM 12/23/2007

Choices that ive made

I think you know why I can never return.
return to a place I know won't ever let me in,
all thats in between - all that I won't ever forget.

Choices ive made, those that I live to regret forever,
I know days go by,
some that wont be erased by time,
no time can take away moments that stay forever.

Taken looks,
took more then one I admit.

As days go by, I think I may grow to be better, better then I was.
I won't forget,
perhaps that may be my problem, where it resides.

forever and nothing more.
I think I know-who I am and why that won't ever change.
the man I became - placed itself in my own blood, and the life of another.

I think I know why my world seems to be falling,
falling apart.

- Mr. E

What remains on my mind

Speak of suicide.

Speak of Suicide.

Years ago, many years ago I had read that if someone speaks about suicide that they are not truly going to do it. Thinking about that, I wonder if it is so?

If I speak about taking my life, does that mean I won't?
I don't agree with it.

I have dealt with my own trials in life.
Most recently especially.
After having come back from war - I feel as if my life has taken a cycle, has turned into something different. This is something I don't tell anyone, I keep it to myself, no one knows.

There do come times when you can't get images out of your head,
when all you see are the images of people dieing,
of death,
of a life that you question,
of actions that you know you never should have taken,
of a world you still don't understand.

I have thought of taking my life, ive thought about it so many times.
Now I speak of it, does that take away from it's meaning?

I don't know if war made me who I am. Or if I made war what it is...
All I can tell you is that the man that I am now, is a man I think I have become - -

- mr. E

Heaven / favorite poem of mine.

Heaven lost its color today.
Love washed away in a rain from the sky above.
Sent down when the words I spoke, were no longer good enough.

Blue paint washed down my arms,
as love failed today, and all the casualties are a mystery,
as it all begins to drift away.
Each time I turn my head theres another falling star,
a forgotten love that never will be known.

In my dreams, all the colors have washed away, in a river
alongside where im standing.
I told you about this - Do you remember we stood together,
watching waters pass by,
now it seperates us becoming deeper everyday.
Cant reach across any longer,
the rivers broken you free,

Though I know if I look inside and see a world separating,
washing away on a cloudless canvas, I know I cant hold on anymore,
cant hold on forever.
Those pictures of us together always pull me in,
drowning in a picture,
all thats holding us together. Lost my sight when I feel,
now your nowhere around.
Even in this water I still hear your name.

Heaven lost its color today,
my soul is black and white,
no more dreams that i know of,
all that i see remains -
even in my thoughts theres no life,
its all gone away, you took my world away as heaven
lost its meaning.

( May 13 01/July 3rd 01/Feb 25 05)

Another look

Look into your own eyes staring back at you-
look into yourself when you feel stripped of everything that doesnt matter anymore.
If you were to open yourself to me -
would you find you don't enjoy it anymore?
I hear the words you speak when you speak them to me.
I know of what you dream every night as you lay silently in a moment you only halfway understand.
You know i think of you all the time - and that scares you (I know it does)
Won't put myself on anymore, for you to burn with a statement.
Dreams won't be of you anymore, my mind is something that I own.
Though when will the time come, answer these questions I have in my
heart patiently for you.

And this dream, is it dream? or a world I want to know.
Have I been here before? Do I want to try it again?
Don't let me fall from you, or yourself fall from me.
Know in my arms I could, but I don't want to hold you down.
picture picking you up as once did for me.
Want to speak your name and know you'll turn around,
to face me, to know me.
I hear the words you speak when you speak them to me.
I know of what you dream every night as you lay silently in a
moment you only halfway understand.

Faces i remember from a solemn dream -
I think I know the words to feel , to describe,
this is something from a place I cant understand.
know im here, know im awake,
knowing im here; does that scare you,
for you anytime you need me to be.

goodbye for the moment -- this is merely the end for this time
(of a dream from 2001 and 2005)

Dress older poetry

here is an old piece of mine entitled "dress"


You wear that dress like its your soul.
Tattered and torn as everything else in your life.
that shell to protect you -
and each day you choose to find another.
In the end you find as much as you try you cant run from yourself.
Its only human. A disease that eats away.

Change your soul as much as you want to.
but all it takes is a moment to find whats missing.
what was thrown down, is it me, or was it your fantasies.
oh no, in the end, what was it you threw down,
that blue dress you always wear?
I'm tired of the way it looks,
and how you act when where it,
each time its worn - you let it change your world.

Everyday can bring a new dress if its what you wish.
though its never going to change everything inside,
cant you realize - don't you understand .
Choose to forget me today, id rather fade away.
if thats what you want.
struggling in the deep - to make sense of what life is about.
today, you chose that red dress thinking its different from
yesterday, its just a color, not a passion, no real difference at all.
but in your shame after your friends looked the way no one
understands.
Your feeling alone.
I know this - ive been there times before.
In your red dress where times seems to go back and forth.
no one else wears it,
because of its beauty, not mass appealing qualities.

this dress is your identity.
one true non judgmental hold on life.
though your not used to it.
still intrigued,
curious to what it has to offer, for the time being,
focus on today.
in a short span of time you might realize all the questions you
have, you always knew the answers.
more then a dream, more then a romantic quality.

those friends look- your world stares.
as it gotten to you.
about to throw your dress down,
tired of what its brought.
wont forget how it made you feel,
how you felt with it around.
even being so new it always felt so right.
see the beauty,
you knew it was there in hiding.
but you'll have no part any longer.

Our military’s current state of decline

This is the unfinished essay for a class I am taking.

The military force of the United States has been one that other countries have looked to for inspiration the two hundred plus years that we have been in existence. We have always tried to be at the forefront of technology, and have worked hard to have the strongest military force and continued to work much harder to keep the reputation of our might alive.

Perhaps that was all in the past though; will we be able to stay a superpower for much longer? That is the question we must ask ourselves.

As with other superpowers of the world, problems do arise. You begin to alienate yourselves from the world around, disregarding problems that will work to bring you down from within. When the mind frame of “might makes right” continues to blur judgment, then, the causes and the effects they produce are seen as small and meager. They continue to be seen as meaningless until they build up enough force to topple. Then a nation’s response is with foresight; this should have been seen.

During our short time as a country, we have never fought in any battles such as those being fought now. As the U.S. military drags into year seven of the war in Afghanistan, and year five of the campaign in Iraq, we face unprecedented manpower problems.

With two wars being fought simultaneously, our military force is being strained to the point of not being able to react in a timely and professional manner to emergencies in and out of our country. General Peter Pace said, “There is a significant risk that the U.S. military won't be able to quickly and fully respond to yet another crisis.” (CBS News)

This isn’t just any soldier saying this; Pace is one of our nations most decorated and highest ranking military members. Pace’s report states that our military is not ready for a new threat. With that in mind, think about how far we are beginning to stretch our forces. Bush is already making threats against Iran; we are not on good terms with Cuba, Russia, and the majority of Middle Eastern countries.

We have what one might refer to, as all our eggs in one basket, these eggs are now starting to overflow and break.

In regard to the might makes right adage, when the U.S. Military headed into Iraq and Afghanistan, forces were not prepared for what we would receive. Going into these theaters, we did not have an overall plan laid out. There was no idea formulated on how we were going to pay for it; or what our exit strategy would be. Donald Rumsfeld was expecting a draw down of troops three months after the fall of Baghdad (Galloway); take a look at the quagmire that we are in. Instead of troop reduction, we are continually increasing the amount of lives in peril.

“Go into a war only when your goals and exit strategy are clear. Take all the troops you think you might need, and then some extra just in case; and get out as soon as you have achieved what you set out to do,” Wrote Former Joint Chief Colin Powell. (Galloway) Each point Powell makes is one that our Government has missed, points that are leading to the decline of our military force.

Without a plan that is thoroughly conceived, then truly no idea of the preparations, and personnel required for the basic mission, much less the extra troops that could be used can be had. This lack of planning leads to the myriad of problems that the military is faced with.

There was a report published by Nancy Pelosi and her underlings that had a lot of valid points to it. No matter how I feel about her as a politician I think she is heading in the right direction. This report was on the readiness of the U.S. military, something I believe I have tried to layout so far. Her report says that there are 19.5 to twenty brigades devoted to both theaters of operations. Army doctrine states that there should be two brigades conducting reset operations for every brigade that is in countries overseas. This is not the current case; the military is stretched to the point where it is a one for one swap unit wise (Defense Tech), units go home for a short time and then prepare to go back again.

This process I think is one that is defeating itself. Member of the military cannot be put in a continuous state of deployment without allowing them the time back on continental soil to train and reset. With two wars being waged wars at the same time, is creating adverse effects that the military will be feeling for the next 20 plus years.

The passing of the Orderly and Responsible Redeployment Appropriations Act is proof of Nancy Pelosi taking steps down the right path. One part of it states, “The bill prohibits deployment of U.S. troops to Iraq who are not fully trained and fully equipped…” Now something like this puts measures in place that will safeguard the discipline, morale and welfare of our soldiers. These are aspects that tend to decline when soldiers begin to feel that they are unprepared to be in combat.

For example, equipment that units have available for training at home station, is most often that which they won’t be seeing in Iraq, thus forcing troops to not be fully mission capable when they get into country. More often then not, they leave CONUS (Continental United States) ill equipped, in hope that the unit that they replace has the equipment hoped for. The continual use of the equipment does not necessarily mean it is in working order, constant use gives you constant breakdown.

While in Iraq you will be given new equipment to test out, to run with per se. As soon as you leave one of the Middle Eastern theaters and head back to the states you then take a step backward into equipment that comes from the late eighties to early nineties. With this happening, you don’t have the measures to ensure our military force is trained in the most modern warfare available.

The onset of prolonged war creates factors in service members that might not have come about otherwise. Lack of discipline is something that rears its head, and the disappearance of moral compass arises. For proof of that look at our war in Vietnam, or engagement, we don’t call that a war anymore.

Putting troops in situations where they don’t know if they will be coming back, or even if after their time is us if they will be given that “ride” home, puts you in a place where all sense of morality is thrown out. In Vietnam acts of random killing of civilians, acts of torture, rape and other things were seen as necessities, as commonplace. In no way am I justifying any of these actions, I only want to point out what goes into tearing apart our military apart.

These factors of not being trained, of not knowing whether you will come home in 12 months, 15 months, 18 months or whatever the Government sees fit at the time are what cause us to have situations such as the debacle that we had in the Abu Ghraib prison. These move soldiers to torture or other acts of extended, psychotic violence that has been taken by military members against insurgents and civilians. Putting a soldier in an extended high stress environment, week after week, month after month, year after year, will only lead to a soldier creating his own moral sense of what is right and what is wrong. As I have heard many people say, “What we do over here doesn’t matter, we need to survive here, and I will do whatever it takes to make it home.” These are the words, the thoughts that lead to soldiers making the wrong decisions.

Vietnam was not so long ago that we would not heed the words of Vietnamese Communist Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap who said in reference to the French, "The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war ..."

I don’t believe any person has ever had words such as those that describe that bog in which the United States Military is in so eloquently.

A double edged sword in which we are facing right now is the coming of better protective equipment. Attacks that occurred in both theaters that would have been catastrophic in 2001 or 2003 are now allowing members to keep their lives. What is the cost to the military when the wounded soldiers begin to amass thirty thousand? (Knickerbocker)

These military members are dealing with a multitude of various wounds. From physical to mental, with the mental ones being some of the most tragic. These soldiers that we are trying to forcibly keep in, with things such as stop loss, and stop movement are the ones who suffer from what we don’t see.

The manpower problems that all branches of the military are facing are composed of so many different aspects. It is not just a case of military members getting out when their contracts are up, but it also one of the mental states that this prolonged war puts them in.

What does an incessant war due to people? That is the question that has an answer no one wants to face. Manpower problems would surely be on the path to eradication if the country actually knew there was an end in sight for these two campaigns in the Middle East.

Let us begin to track this. Veterans make up one out of four homeless people, (Rourke), and out of those people there are already 1,500 reported homeless veterans from the current wars. This is only the amount of those who have been found and reported.

Could the fate of these 1,500 veterans have been changed? I truly believe that it could have, had our current administration chosen to acknowledge the severity of the main problem facing returning veterans, PTSD.

Putting military members in the situations where their lives are threatened everyday, where they go from one harrowing ordeal into the next does not allow for the greatest mental state of mind. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the anxiety disorder that develops from these things, this is also known as “Shell Shock.”

Blog would not accept the works cited parameters, but if you want my sources just ask and ill send you the page.

-- M r. E.
Keep in mind this is not the finished product.

Why rain, and mud bother me.

Even when I remember this I do get sickened.
But it weighs on me- -I can't tell you how hard it is for me on rainy wet days, or even when there is just mud from a hose around.

This happened sometime in November of 2005, we had not been there for that long.
We were in a town in our sector, and I remember hearing a huge explosion, I look toward where there was an overpass and there a huge plume of smoke rising in the air.

We responded to the explosion, and I remember getting there and seeing the body parts everywhere.
A torso here, a torso there, legs strewn in random places, arms mangled and separated from their bodies -

Heads of these soldiers were not even recognizable. You could not even tell if they were human. When you are torn apart by a bomb your body gets pulverized and mashed into hamburger from the concussion and then in a split second torn b y the shrapnel.

There was one soldier alive, barely alive when we got there, and his friends from his unit that had gotten there also were trying to tend to him.

I remember that guy asking for help from the Medic in my platoon, Doc. Scott, and he went up there and then came back to us saying there was nothing he could do.
I remember how mad that other guy got, he was rushing back and forth, I knew how much he wanted to save that soldiers life, his name was pope, but our Scott, told me he was taking his last breaths.
I hoped that was so,
I truly hoped that he would die soon,
he wasn't even screaming, despite how destroyed his body was,

I looked toward his arm that was hanging to the side of him, and there was a stump at the wrist from where his hand used to be, and right beside him was his hand inside of a glove.


Back to why wet weather and mud bother me.
This day had been kind of wet, there was mud around.
I had been walking around, taking a survey of the scene, and I noticed there was something on the bottom of my boot, I thought this was mud.
So I start trying to scrape it off of my boot on the ground,
it won't come off.

I then pull my boot up,
what was on my boot that day was not mud,
not anything you could scrape from your boot nor anything I have ever been able to scrape from my mind.
It was a chunk of flesh.

Do you really want the truth?

When people what is wrong, what is going on with you? I always wonder do they want the truth, or do they want some sugarcoated version of it?
The majority of the time when I am asked, it seems as though I am not really expected to answer. It is just a question to pass the time by.

Would they really like to know how I am?
When I do end up speaking the truth people look horrified.
Do you understand that my entire life is run by one place, Iraq.
I may be out o the military, and I am no in Iraq, but the times and experiences, they run my life. Every passing day I feel as if I am back there, everyday I think about it, thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, these are not just holidays to me, they mean something deeper to me-
they make me remember.
-

Who I am. From then to now.

Who am I?
Unless you know my email address, or the blog that I mod. with a friend, let us keep this anonymous. If you do feel as if you have come to find who I am, keep it to yourself, please.

I am a man who did two tours in Iraq, both with the 101st (AA) DIV, out of Ft. Campbell, I believe that may be all you need to know about that. I have been wounded in combat, and I have things that I wish I had never seen, things that I wonder why god let me see.

Currently I am trying to seek mental AID from the Veterans Affairs Hospital here in Tx - and I hope to show you the struggle that one has to go through for help.

Before I got out of the Military, I as having a lot of trouble sleeping, I was having constant nightmares ( I still am ) and I was turning to alcohol for help, I did seek more help from the Psychiatric services on base. There were no appointments available, there wouldn't be for weeks is what I was told. Think about that, when you seek help, there is none, so you continue with methods that may alleviate and help, the alcohol.
I remember I had already been out of the military for about three months, this was about April of 2007, and I finally received a phone call from the Psychiatric office at Ft. Campbell letting me know they could fit me in for an appointment.

Much too late. So here is my own struggle, my journey. I know I will never be the same man I was before Iraq took part of my soul - - its a part I will never ever regain.

So these are my words. Thank you for reading.

- Mr. E