Vignettes IV

[e-ReK]

Still working on these ones.

IV.
We were in Combat Survival Training, in the Rocky Mountains. Me, JT and Brandon in a fire team, evading, sneaking, playing a massive game of hide and seek.

We holed up the first day between a few rocks, surrounded by trees on either side. We’d be there for hours. I never really know how beautiful the wilderness was.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the vastness of the world. I try to keep that perspective; remember that in my hectic life and self-conscious ways that there are so many other people out there just like me. I put my ruck down next to me, slanting it against the rock to blend in more and laid back for a view of the clear sky.

It was a perfect blue, and there were no clouds anywhere I looked. The pine trees surrounding me all pointed into the center of whatever I was looking at. Here I was, in between two moss covered rocks, laid out like a child in combat gear, staring at the sky.

I thought that I was staring right into God’s eyes: pine trees circling a blue iris that was the sky. God, it was beautiful.

I imagined what fall must be like there. Fiery red and orange leaves contrasting the pure blue sky. Spring would have golden yellow flowers speckling the bright green grassy backdrop like a Van Gogh painting.

Sometimes a bird would cross the sky from such a great height that it looked like an ant. Here I was, the whole world upside down, a giant bird observing me from a distance, and God staring at me from the infinite depths above.
***
We woke up at 0400 before sunrise and got ready to move out of our nights resting point. We were on the move for about an hour until we were in drainage at the bottom of a ridge with a jeep trail on top of it. This was our checkpoint, and we were well ahead on time, so we holed up in a patch of rocks and trees. Brandon usually napped and JT always read his Bible. Again, all I could do was look up and watch night turn to day and light fill the sky.

I could not see the sun, but it had finally risen and cast a glorious glow over the tops of the trees around me. They looked like paint brushes with a yellowish luster on their tips. I watched them paint the sky a gradient hue of red, purple, blue, and orange. Soon, the brushes were fully dabbed in yellow-green and the sky slowly turned to a clear blue.

I looked over at JT who had set his Bible down. “You like writing, huh?” He said. I replied “I don’t like writing as much as I do painting pictures.” Then, we got up and moved out.
***
In the woods, you might get hungry enough to believe that MRE’s are God’s gift to man. We get 2 MRE’s for 8 days, so you have to ration them out over 4 days each.

It’s funny to think of MRE’s as if they were people. The popular ones are pasta type meals like ravioli and spaghetti because they taste just like Chef Boy Ardee. The chicken with noodles isn’t bad either. No matter which MRE you get stuck with, you have to deal with it just like the people around you.

In MRE’s the directions are as clear as possible; the Army needs to able to understand how to use them. In the heating pack, a chemical reaction between water and some other stuff takes place releasing a great amount of heat and steam. The heater simply says: fill with water up to here, fold top, lean on rock or something. I laugh at the simplistic and generic nature of the whole idea – I mean the military is taking the lowest seller to manufacture these on-the-go processed meals with no shelf life.

I heard one of my buddies once got a pack of Skittles (awesome!) with a contest to win tickets to the 1996 World Series baseball game. I mean, if I was an MRE, I might be the one with that Skittles pack: an old soul wrapped up, maybe, just maybe, being discovered. If I was an MRE I couldn’t be anything extravagant like vegetarian pesto pasta or chicken fajita or enchilada. My packaging would simply read: kid growing up…

Scratch that out, let me start this again.

In the woods, you might get hungry enough to believe that MRE’s are God’s gift to man. We get 2 MRE’s for 8 days, so you have to ration them out over 4 days each. Because of this, you might resort to other means of procuring nutrients – like eating plants, or bugs.

Yesterday I ate a live grasshopper. I took its soul. No really, I took that damn bugs soul. It kind of kicked a little; a futile attempt to break free from my jaws, escape my mouth and happily hop away to live its bugs life. But it couldn’t, and soon I swallowed it and it burned in my stomach acid’s abyss. It was grass flavored protein, and ultimately all it lived for was to fuel my body.

For a split second, I thought it was cruel and that I was some sort of evil for eating it, but I reasoned that it served its only purpose in life; it fulfilled what it was meant to do.

When I was holed up this morning, I came to debate what the more dreadful scenario was: starving in the woods for 8 days or being that little grasshopper. To tell you the truth, I don’t know, but I know that there’s a grasshopper inside all of us, trying to break free, and whether we swallow it or not is the only decision we have.
***
My favorite phrase in the English language is “the truth is,” because it means absolutely nothing. Nobody really knows what “the truth” is. It holds too much power sometimes and I think that using it insincerely is one of the worst things that could ever be done. It’s lying.

The truth is, I write all the time about the struggles of growing up, how much I don’t want to and end up questioning if I ever make the right decisions, fearful of regret. And in the end, no matter what, I look down on a lap full of regret either for something I’ve done, but usually for what I failed to do. It sounds depressing, and I used to convince myself that it was.

Then, I realized that my regret was never really regret at all. I looked back, not in sorrow, but in shock, awe, sometimes disgust, but usually amazement at my life.

I think about it, and honestly I hate life. But the truth is, life is so damn beautiful that it’s impossible not to love it.