Lately I’ve been feeling overwhelmingly fatigued. My body has been demanding a lot of sleep but even when I sleep 12 hours, my sleep isn’t deep enough to leave me feeling refreshed. Life seems to be passing in a blur, and every day blends together.
The background harmonies here are always the same. In the distance, explosions make dull thumps. Nearby, sirens wail constantly. Helicopters fly low over our hooches, vibrating me in my bed and making the roof, floor and walls shake momentarily as two or three Blackhawks fly by a few feet overhead. When you add these noises to the karoake parties that are held outdoors at night, it’s sometimes still very surreal after three months in theater.
I sleep restlessly in this place. Something is always waking me back up as soon as I drop off. Even when I am wearing my noise canceling headphones, something always shakes the hooch as I’m dropping off or going into REM sleep and forces me back into alertness. The only thing that seems to help is working out to the point of exhaustion. Once I’m sufficently drained, my body shuts down and allows me the rest I need. Despite this, I feel tired all the time. I think I’m tired of living in a sea of concrete and metal surrounded by a city that seems to be filled with madmen. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for common Iraqis.
Easy solutions and leisurely existences are a pipe dream for most people in land of the two rivers. Until Iraqis move beyond the legacy of religious strife that is their heritage the problems will continue. The power squabbles that are the backdrop for life here are a major reason for the snail’s pace at which Iraq is able to rebuild and add the basic infrastructure required for a decent quality of life.
It’s well past time for Iraqi leaders to put aside their real and petty differences and all start pulling together. It’s time to root out the evil sociopaths among the various factions so the sentences of life in Iraq will no longer have death and war as their punctuation marks. I’m ready to sleep soundly again, and I hope most Iraqis will be too in the near present future.